History is rarely as tidy as the stories we tell about it. Places acquire names long before they acquire nations; peoples inherit memories they did not themselves create; languages, religions and identities change without ever quite erasing what came before. Palestine may be one of the world’s most conspicuous examples of this historical palimpsest, a place where ancient geography, successive civilisations and modern national identities have become so entangled that disentangling them can itself seem political.
That is partly why I have always valued William Dalrymple. He is a historian who understands that the past is inhabited by people, not merely populated by dates and events. His recent conversation about Palestine prompted me to revisit not only what he said, but what he left unsaid: the complicated process by which a population became a people, a geographical name acquired a modern national meaning, and history became memory – and memory, in turn, became identity.
It also led me back to a broader fascination of mine: the relationship between history, travel and place, and to writers who understand that landscapes are not backdrops to history but repositories of it.
The featured image at the head of this post? When last In Ramallah, de facto administrative “capital” of that part of the West Bank governed by the Palestinian Authority – Area A of the Oslo dispensation – we visited the cultural centre of Dar Zahran, a beautifully restored Ottoman house just south of the city. By fortunate serendipity, Dar Zahran was hosting a small exhibition of paintings by the late Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout. This large painting pictures the skyline of Jerusalem – Al Quds with its mosques and churches and the infinite variety of the Palestinian people, was front and centre. [In In That Howling Infinite, see Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]
Talking about Palestine and Palestinians
There are some historians whose books I buy almost automatically. British historian William Dalrymple is one of them. I have read many of his works over the years, from his debut, In Xanadu, through From the Holy Mountain, The Last Mughal, Return of a King and The Anarchy (see, in In That Howling Infinite, Bad company – how Britain conquered India, the story of the rise and fall of the notoriously rapacious British East India Company).
Dalrymple is well-educated, well-read, and well-travelled, having had his boots on the ground and its dust on those boots. He is what we call a “popular” historian and not an academic in the narrow sense, writing with enthusiasm, empathy, and the authority of someone who has visited the places he describes. And, to borrow from Bob Dylan, he knows his song well before he starts singing. His aim, refreshingly, is to educate, not to inculcate.
What has always appealed to me is not simply the depth of his scholarship but his refusal to become anyone’s court historian. His admirers come from different directions, and his critics do too. The old Empire loyalists dislike him because he writes unflinchingly about the violence and arrogance of imperialism. Progressives often embrace him for precisely that reason, yet they, too, sometimes seem disappointed when he refuses to enlist in their causes. Dalrymple has always struck me as someone who hoes his own row. He follows the evidence where it leads rather than where his audience might wish it to go.
That quality was on full display in his recent interview with Palestinian journalist and British resident Ahmed Alnaouq on the chat show Palestine Deep Dive, discussing his forthcoming, and as yet unfinished, book on the Palestinians. I encourage reader to take the time to watch the video below before reading the detailed appraisal that follows; but the time poor may nevertheless find it of interest.
To anyone familiar with the history of the region, little of the story itself is unfamiliar. Nor, contrary to some popular assumptions, has this history been ignored by Israeli historians. Ilan Pappé’s A History of Modern Palestine remains one of the best examples of a history that restores Palestinians to the centre of their own story, particularly those who rarely appear in conventional political histories: the villagers who cultivated the land, often on estates owned by absentee urban families or tribal elites who harvested much of the wealth.
That, perhaps, is the real significance of Dalrymple’s project. It belongs not simply to Middle Eastern history but to the much broader revolution that historians call social history. For centuries history was largely the story of rulers, wars, dynasties and diplomacy. Ordinary people appeared only fleetingly. Their lives belonged, if anywhere, to anthropology or sociology. Only relatively recently have historians begun asking what history looked like from the fields rather than the palaces.
Yet there is another trap which Dalrymple carefully avoids.
It has become fashionable to speak of the inhabitants of Palestine as though they constituted an unchanged people stretching seamlessly from biblical times until today. That is no more convincing than similar claims made by almost any nation.
Palestine has always been one of the great crossroads of civilisation. Long before the Philistines and the Hebrews there were other peoples. Afterwards came Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and countless others, accompanied not merely by armies but by settlers, merchants, pilgrims, labourers and refugees. Even in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, economic opportunity attracted migrants from throughout the Levant. The Suez Canal, the expansion of Haifa, the Hauran railway, and later British infrastructure projects all drew workers from neighbouring lands. Family names such as al-Misri, al-Shami, Homsi and Halabi quietly preserve those journeys.
And yet Dalrymple is equally correct when he points to the growing body of genetic evidence demonstrating profound continuities across the centuries. Human populations do not simply replace one another like changing tenants. They absorb, intermingle and endure. DNA reveals not racial purity but remarkable persistence.
One aspect of the interview that particularly caught my attention was Dalrymple’s discussion of religion – not as an immutable badge of identity but as another thread in the long weaving of Palestinian society. Conversion, he observed, was rarely a single dramatic event. More often it was gradual, pragmatic and deeply human. Families embraced Christianity under Byzantine rule, Islam under the Caliphates and the Ottomans, sometimes from conviction, sometimes because new rulers brought new opportunities, and often because children simply inherited the world into which they were born. Nor was the movement one way. Jews became Christians; Christians became Muslims; communities adapted over centuries rather than changing overnight.
Language followed much the same path. Arabic became not merely the language of religion but of administration, commerce, literature and everyday life. It gradually supplanted earlier tongues without erasing the peoples who spoke them. Identity, like language itself, accumulated layer upon layer.
His brief reference to Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab particularly caught my attention because I suspect it offers an important clue to the intellectual architecture of the book he is writing Rapoport’s central thesis is that peoples are not born fully formed; they become. It exercised a profound influence on my own essay One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. See also, Becoming Arab … the myth of fingerprints
There is a quiet subversiveness in Becoming Arab because it quietly removes the ladder that every competing nationalism insists upon climbing. By demonstrating that Arab identity in medieval Palestine emerged through a long process of linguistic, cultural and social transformation rather than existing unchanged since antiquity, Rapoport undermines the comforting assumption that any modern national identity is primordial and immutable. The implication extends well beyond Palestinians. Jews, too, have continually reinvented themselves through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. Israelis and Palestinians alike remain peoples in the making.
Belonging, then, rests less upon ancient blood than upon lived continuity, accumulated memory and attachment to place. Rapoport gently redirects us away from the sterile question, “Who was here first?”, towards the infinitely richer question, “How do people come to belong?” It is an insight I have found equally illuminating when thinking about the British, the Americans, and even the tangled histories of Russians and Ukrainians. It also underpins what I have elsewhere called the “myth of fingerprints”: the mistaken belief that nations possess fixed and immutable identities when, in truth, every people is a palimpsest, written and rewritten over centuries without ever completely erasing what came before.
Dalrymple also highlighted the remarkable role of churches and monasteries across successive eras – Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and British. They were far more than places of worship. They were centres of learning, repositories of manuscripts, guardians of memory and, eventually, pioneers of modern education. During the Mandate years, Christian schools became among the first institutions to embrace European models of education. It is therefore hardly surprising that Christian Arabs were disproportionately represented among the intellectual architects of both Arab nationalism and the emerging Palestinian national movement. This, too, complicates the modern tendency to reduce the story to a simple contest between Jews and Muslims. The reality, as always, is richer and more textured.
Dalrymple’s passing reference to George Antonius was equally telling. Antonius remains one of the most poignant figures of the Mandate years. Urbane, multilingual and deeply cultivated, he believed there remained a path towards accommodation between Arab and Jewish aspirations. Alongside moderates such as Musa Alami, he searched for political middle ground as extremism steadily crowded out compromise. Increasingly isolated, distrusted by radicals on both sides and ultimately ignored by the great powers, he watched the possibility of reconciliation slip away. He died in Jerusalem in 1942, disappointed and politically alone. There is something profoundly melancholy about his story. Men such as Antonius devoted their lives to preventing the catastrophe that would later be remembered as the Nakba. History tends to remember the militants, the revolutionaries and the generals; it is far less generous to the moderates who failed. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it is often those failed moderates who seem to have understood the coming tragedy most clearly. [See The first Intifada … Palestine 1936]
There is, however, a significant historical link missing from Dalrymple’s account.
To speak of Palestinians as a people with a distinctive heritage, history and culture is entirely legitimate, but it also raises the prior question of when and how that collective identity emerged. The people we now call Palestinians did not arrive in Palestine as a discrete nation from elsewhere; they emerged over centuries from the settled populations of the region, predominantly Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians alongside smaller Jewish and other communities, whose identities under Ottoman rule were more likely to be local, familial, religious, Ottoman or broadly Arab than specifically Palestinian. A modern Palestinian national consciousness crystallised only in the late nineteenth and, more decisively, the first half of the twentieth century, amid the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, British rule, Zionist immigration and the intensifying struggle over the land.
Nor should “Palestine” itself be confused with a Palestinian nation: the name is far older, deriving ultimately from Greek and Roman Palaestina and subsequently used in various forms by Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and European writers; under the Ottomans, the territory was not a sovereign province or nation-state called Palestine but was divided among administrative districts. None of this makes Palestinian identity artificial. Like most modern national identities, it is both modern and genuine, rooted in an older population and a deeply layered attachment to place.
Perhaps Dalrymple simply takes this history as read. More likely, it is unmentioned because the interviewer did not ask about it. He does write about it in a piece published in The Guardian in August 2025 (republished below). But his readers and particularly an audience hearing a relatively compressed interview – may not. When the process by which a people acquired a modern national identity is left unstated, audiences tend to fill the gap with their own assumptions: some hearing an ancient, continuous Palestinian nation, others an identity recently invented from nothing. Both are historical distortions. The point is not to diminish Palestinian peoplehood but to locate it accurately: between the much older history of the land and the modern political history that transformed its inhabitants into distinct national communities.
As with Israeli identity, Palestinian identity belongs to the modern age while drawing upon memories, attachments, communities and histories that are considerably older. That distinction is essential if the Palestinian story is to be understood rather than simply enlisted in one of the competing narratives of the conflict.
It was telling that, despite repeated invitations from his interviewer, Dalrymple steadfastly refused to enter the contemporary ideological battlefield. He would not be drawn into pronouncements about settler colonialism, the legitimacy of Israel or competing national claims. He remained a historian.
Dalrymple displayed the same intellectual discipline when discussion turned towards the future. His interviewer clearly hoped he would venture predictions. He declined. Historians, he observed, can tell us what happened; they are far less qualified to say what will happen. The future delights in making fools of prophets.
Anthony Eden supposedly reduced politics to three words: “Events, dear boy, events.” Orwell supplied the darker warning through the Ministry of Truth: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That remains one of the great cautions against allowing history to become merely another instrument of political mobilisation. Less bleakly, Robert Fisk – another writer I greatly admired – offered the wisest answer of all: “My crystal ball is broken.” Those who confidently predict the future almost invariably discover that history has other ideas. [See The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue ]
One curiosity remained with me after the interview. Dalrymple remarked upon young Israeli soldiers carrying rifles almost everywhere, yet the obvious question went unexplored: why? I have wondered about this myself ever since my first visit to Israel. I can still picture my late friend Avi’s rifle standing against the hallway wall in his parents’ home in Ramat Gan after he returned from reserve duty during the 1973 war. On my most recent visit I asked Israelis directly. Unless a weapon can be securely stored, soldiers are required to keep it with them. Our friend Shmuel’s son, serving as an army medic, once absent-mindedly left his rifle on a military bus after an exhausting exercise. His reward was several weeks in military prison. What appears to outsiders as a symbol of militarisation is, to many Israelis, simply one more expression of a society shaped by permanent insecurity.
Dalrymple also refers to the annual Jerusalem Day march, an event that commemorates the IDF’s capture of the Old City in June 1967 and the “unification” of the city. We happened to witness similar scenes ourselves near the Western Wall only days beforehand. They were ugly, confronting and impossible to dismiss as merely social media caricature.
I look forward to reading the finished book. Not because I expect it to settle the argument—history almost never does—but because the best historians enlarge rather than narrow our understanding. They remind us that identities are not fossils buried in the earth waiting to be excavated, but living things, fashioned over centuries by conquest and coexistence, faith and language, migration and memory. They leave us with fewer slogans and more questions; fewer certainties and greater humility. In an age increasingly addicted to binaries, that may be the most subversive act of all.
Travelers’ tales
There is a thread that runs through much of my writing, though I did not always recognise it at the time. It is a thread woven from history, travel, memory and place, and it connects figures as seemingly disparate as Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They are very different writers, with different perspectives and different temperaments, but they share a quality that I have always valued: they do not simply describe places; they allow places to speak.
During my early encounters with the history and culture of the Middle East at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – the “Madrasat al-Jawāsīs”, the “School of Spies”, as Arab friends would jokingly call it – I became fascinated by a trio of British writers whose books transported me into the worlds they described.described. Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Jan Morris each approached the region differently, yet all possessed that rare ability to convey not merely information but atmosphere: the smells of markets, the rhythms of streets, the weight of history embedded in landscapes.
Jan Morris was perhaps the greatest exponent of this art. Her genius was not merely as a chronicler of empire, nor simply as a travel writer, but as someone who understood that places possess personalities. She once wrote, “All my life I have felt in places, in landscapes as in cities, an allure that seems to me actually sexual, purer but no less exciting than the sexuality of the body.” It is a remarkable observation because it captures something that many travellers experience but few can articulate: that certain landscapes exert a pull beyond geography, that cities and countries can possess a kind of emotional and even sensual presence.
Bell, the archaeologist, traveller and administrator sometimes called the “Queen of the Desert”, was present at the creation of the modern Middle East after the First World War. Stark travelled through the region in the middle decades of the twentieth century, recording a world already beginning to disappear. James Morris, later Jan Morris, chronicled the rise and decline of British imperial confidence and the uncertain transition into a post-imperial age.
What makes Jan Morris such a fascinating figure is that her personal transformation occurred alongside the transformation of Britain itself. The end of Empire and the discovery of a new identity unfolded in parallel. The writer who chronicled the fading grandeur of British power was also undergoing a profound reimagining of self. Her Pax Britannica trilogy remains an extraordinary work, though it is also deeply complicated. Morris’s relationship with empire was neither a simple condemnation nor an uncomplicated celebration. She recognised its violence and arrogance, yet she was also fascinated by its energy, ambition and sense of adventure. Empire, in her telling, was a vast human drama: magnificent, destructive, creative and cruel.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 represented the moment when that imperial illusion finally collapsed. Morris described it as a kind of tombstone for British power and a crisis of British masculinity. The old confidence had disappeared. The imperial actor who had once imagined himself striding across the world stage was suddenly confronted with his own limitations. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging,” she wrote. “Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.” That insight resonates far beyond Britain. History repeatedly teaches us that identities and institutions which appear permanent are often temporary arrangements. Empires, nations and cultures are not fixed monuments but living things, constantly being reshaped by events.
This is why William Dalrymple’s work has always appealed to me. Like Morris, he understands that history is not simply about dates, battles and rulers. It is about people in places. His great strength is that he belongs to no faction. He follows the evidence, and he makes his own judgments. He resists the temptation to reduce history to contemporary political arguments. Instead, he explored the deeper processes by which societies and identities emerge.
As we have noted above, his observations intersect with Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab, a work that has greatly influenced my own thinking. Rapoport challenges the assumption that national identities are ancient, fixed and immutable. Arab identity in Palestine, he argues, emerged through centuries of linguistic, cultural and social development. This does not diminish Palestinian identity; rather, it explains how all identities are formed.
The same applies elsewhere. Jewish identity has also evolved through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. British identity, American identity, Russian identity and Ukrainian identity are all products of history rather than timeless inheritances. Peoples are not fingerprints stamped permanently into existence. They are palimpsests, written and rewritten across generations, retaining traces of what came before while continually becoming something new.
This is also why Dalrymple’s observations about religion are significant. Faith, like language, is not simply inherited unchanged through the centuries. Communities converted, adapted and transformed. Jews became Christians, Christians became Muslims, and Arabic gradually became the dominant language of administration, commerce and culture. Churches and monasteries served not only as places of worship but as centres of learning and memory. During the British Mandate, as we have noted above, Christian schools were among the pioneers of modern education, and Christian Arabs played a disproportionately important role in the development of Arab nationalism and Palestinian political consciousness.
Again, the lesson is one of complexity. The history of Palestine cannot be reduced to simple categories. It is a story of migration and continuity, faith and adaptation, conflict and coexistence.
A personal coda
I make no comparison between my own experiences and those of writers such as Morris or Dalrymple, who devoted years of their lives to the places they studied. My own travels have been measured in days and weeks rather than prolonged residence, and I possess neither their linguistic gifts nor their local knowledge. Yet they have taught me some of the same lessons.
Over the years I have wandered through mosques and basilicas, monasteries and synagogues, castles and catacombs, museums and markets. I have traced the layers of history in weathered stones, walked streets that have changed little for centuries, and watched successive civilisations leave their marks upon the same landscape. Everywhere, the faces, languages and faiths have reminded me that history is one of mixture rather than purity, continuity rather than replacement. it is this extraordinary diversity that makes these lands so compelling.
Israel and Palestine affected me more deeply than almost anywhere else. I have read widely, but books can only take one so far. I have stood at checkpoints, seen the separation barrier close up and, witnessed the daily inconveniences, restrictions and humiliations that accompany life under occupation. Equally, I have spoken with Israelis and Palestinians whose lives have been shaped by generations of fear and insecurity, and come to understand, even if not always to agree with, the fears that underpin so many aspects of everyday life. By design, good fortune or simple caution, I have never witnessed the violence itself. But I have seen enough to understand that both peoples live with histories that cannot simply be dismissed.
Travel has not made me an idealist, nor has it turned me into a partisan. If anything, it has left me increasingly suspicious of certainties. The longer one spends amidst places where history is layered one civilisation upon another, the harder it becomes to accept simple stories about pure origins, immutable identities, uniquely righteous causes, and uncomplicated heroes and villains. Reality is almost always more complicated – and more human – than that.
Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of writers like Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They remind us that landscapes have longer memories than nations, that stones often preserve truths that politics attempts to conceal, and that history is rarely a straight line. It is a conversation across centuries, written by countless hands.
In the forward to East – an Arab anthology, republished below, I wrote: “these are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude”. Their histories are “carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone”. And perhaps that is why they continue to draw us back: because beneath every empire, every ideology and every argument lie the enduring traces of ordinary human beings who lived, loved, fought, worshipped and dreamed in the same places we walk today.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
In these troubled times, I look back on a part of the world that has captivated much of my intellectual life. I was drawn to the Middle East in another age, when it was the land of myth and magic, of dreamers and adventurers, of quixotic tilters at windmills, of pioneers who would make the deserts bloom, of dissemblers and deceivers bearing false promises. The ancient lands of the Bible, the fabled realm of A Thousand and One Nights, the restless quests of Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, and TE Lawrence; the pulp-fiction fantasies of Frank Herbert, James Michener, and Leon Uris; the celluloid myths of Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Paul Newman.
These are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here since time immemorial. We still see the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We can chart their decline and fall in monuments and mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs,” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines.” Histories carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone, as “canyons and castles pass ageless and ageing and captive in time.”
I first travelled through these lands when the gaze of our Western world was directed elsewhere. The big stories then were the Vietnam quagmire and the Cold War, words made flesh when Brezhnev’s Red Army euthanised the Prague Spring – much as Nikita Kruschev crushed Hungary’s short lived revolution a decade earlier. Then plucky little Israel – that’s how the world viewed the Jewish state back in the day – made its pre-emptive blitzkrieg against the braggadocio of Egypt, and the dubious martial prowess of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and put the Middle East back in the news again.
And there it has stayed, with hijackings, hostages, terrorism, the Oil Crisis and OPEC, civil war and invasion in Lebanon, Gulf Wars One, Two, and Three, the Twin Towers, the Wars of American Vengeance. And so to the present day, the brief Arab Spring giving way to a long and bloody Arab Winter, and the demolition of the Sykes-Picot dispensation with Daish’s redrawing of the map of the Middle East, the Abraham Accords with their promise of Arab-Israeli “normalisation” – an opaque and controversial word in this box canyon of false hopes – the fall of the Assad regime and the prospect of a revived Syria, and, in the endgame of many Israeli incursions into Hamas’ Gaza autocracy, the pogrom of October 7 and Israel’s biblical vengeance.
There is a place for dissertations on the state of the world and the tectonic movements that continue to reverberate and ricochet through these most antique of lands. And this is not one. But they have been the inspiration for much of my writing, and this volume is an anthology of those pieces. And unavoidably, they reflect and comment upon ideas and incidents, actions and accidents, memories and monuments.
I wear the weave of history like a second skin, as though each stone, each ruin, each sun-baked wadi, each vibrant soul has pressed itself into my being. As the Irish novelist John Banville wrote, “the past beats inside me like a second heart,” and in these lands, it beats with a particular resonance – ancient and immediate, mythic and human. The Middle East is not merely a subject of study or a theatre for politics; it is a history and geography I have walked through, a landscape I have viewed, a culture I have carried with me in the dust of its deserts, in the sounds and scents of its streets, in the quiet of its mosques, churches and synagogues, and its ruins.
My poems and songs have mirrored what I have carried in memory, and carry still. The cadence of markets and mosques, the call to prayer, the silence of the canyons. the desert wind, remind me that these lands live not only in history books but in lived, sung, remembered experience of all who have passed through They recall centuries of triumph and loss. The past is not distant; it rises in waves, song lines across stone and sand, linking the footsteps of pilgrims, soldiers, merchants, and wanderers with my own.
I know the Old Cities of Jerusalem and Damascus like my own neighbourhood. I’ve promenaded down the Street Called Straight and the Suq Al Hammadiyeh many times; shopped in the ancient Aleppo Souk – before it was destroyed; walked though the deserted Dead Cities of the North – which became later refuge for the homeless; climbed the Masada massif twice, once in the full heat of high summer, and again one time in predawn darkness to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea and Moab; traveled overland through the Judean Desert to the old monastery of Mar Saba Stood; stood atop the battlements of Krak de Chevaliers; slept a ledge overlooking Petra, the Rose City and walked the Siq both ways three times; rode in a jeep through the canyons of Wadi Rum; traveled on the famous Nairn Express from Damascus to Baghdad, and an old bus through the Khyber Pass; stood by the Euphrates at Babylon, the Nile at Karnak, and the Ganges at burning ghat of Varenesi; visited Palmyra and watched the sunset atop Qala’at Fakhe al Din al Ma’ani.
All of these, now memories, carry the stories of centuries: the echo of prophets, conquerors, poets, and common folk whose lives have risen and fallen in patterns invisible yet inscribed in every wall, every minaret, every crumbling mosaic. The present weighs upon them as heavily as the past: geopolitics, ideology, oil, invasion, and resistance all leave their marks, mingling with the dust of empires long gone. Yet amid it all, the pulse of life persists—bright, stubborn, and singin – reminding me that beauty and despair coexist in ways the mind alone can scarcely contain.
These lands, as I first knew them, were the lands of story, legend, and lore; of pilgrims and explorers; of warriors and sages. And now, reading, writing and singing their echoes through books, prose and verse, I understand that memory, imagination, and presence are inseparable. One cannot approach the Middle East without the awareness that history is embodied, tactile, insistent: in the sun upon skin, the dust on boots, the voices of markets, mosques, and alleys, and in the pull of ruins that hold the ghosts of kings and commoners alike.
Writing about the Middle East, I am reminded that story, song, and memory intertwine. The poems and songs I carry are part of this landscape, as much as the stones and winds themselves, shaping how I see, feel, and reflect. Their cadence is my compass, their imagery my guide, the echoes, the pulse of lands that refuse abstraction. Here, history and the present are inseparable; the past is alive in the dust, the stone, the sun, and the song.
I wear its dust, I carry its past, I feel its presence. In prose and in song, in memory and in presence, I am tethered to these lands. And in this tethering, I find the resonance that drives the writing in this anthology: an awareness of the Middle East not as a distant object but as a living, breathing interlocutor, shaping thought, reflection, and imagination with the weight, warmth, and insistence of centuries.
“I’d like to think that perhaps it is something intrinsically part of my software – an ability to adapt, accept, empathize, and, as far as it is indeed possible for a stranger, to become one with the scenery and slip into the machinery, and, to put it bluntly, take it all at face value. As a “stranger in a strange land”, I accepted what I saw, observed, heard and learned, moved on – to quote American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti – like “a mirror walking down a strange street’. For this is how I traveled in those roving years, leaving very little by way of words and pictures of my travelling. All I saw, heard, observed, felt and learned was mostly stashed away on my own, internal hard-drive to be accessed in latter years – waiting, perhaps, for the advent of social media, blogs and highly portable electronic devices”.
In October 2025, William Dalrymple wrote this fine piece on the long, entangled history of Gaza in The Guardian, publicizing a forthcoming multi-episode series on his excellent Empire podcast. He wrote of how the territory’s ancient heritage has too often been ignored. As we mourn incalculable human losses, learning about its past can help us better understand the present
As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.
Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.
Gaza was first referenced as a strategic prize in an Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE, where it is referred to as Ghazzati. It is also one of the most fought-over and contested spaces: for more than 4,000 years this area has been an ethnically mixed crossroads, linking Africa with Asia, and the desert with the Mediterranean. It has also been a crucial strategic and economic hub: an often incredibly rich and prosperous port from which the spices, incense, perfumes and wines of western Asia were exported to Greece and Rome, the end of the caravan route from Arabia via Petra. As well as a fortress guarding the strategically crucial route leading from the eastern Mediterranean coastline to Egypt.
Travellers who visited Gaza over the centuries have often remarked on the fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture, both of which are the products of its underground waters and theMediterranean climate. It is this that enabled Gaza to grow the excellent grapes that for many centuries were made into a much celebrated sweet wine, the Château d’Yquem of the classical world. An exhibition of the salvaged antiquities of Gaza currently showing at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris opens with a fabulous display of the distinctive “torpedo jars” in which the Gazans exported their wine. As late as the sixth century AD, these amphorae were reaching both Merovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England.
Each successive power in the Middle East has always wanted to own Gaza, and to conquer it, and over the centuries we hear of a succession of empires – first the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and later the Umayyads, Mamluks, Turks and the British – coming through and fighting to seize it. More difficult to see in the chronicles of conquests and sieges are the locals who have always lived hereabouts, century after century, whose faith has slowly evolved from paganism to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, and whose dominant language has moved from Aramaic to Greek then from Greek to Arabic.
Archaeology shows that the DNA of the different peoples who lived here has remained fairly consistent throughout the centuries: the modern inhabitants of this land, both Jewish and Palestinian, share much the same mix of DNA groups as the peoples who lived here in the bronze age, and whose skeletons have been tested in contemporary labs. The small Samaritan and Palestinian Christian minorities, the latter descendants of the first Christians, exhibit genetic patterns that are especially close to those extracted from ancient skeletons.
Although the town remained a robust centre of paganism long after many other cities in the region, its beachfront was also the home to the earliest monasteries of Palestine, as followers of St Antony of Egypt migrated there bringing the monastic movement to the Levant; soon “the desert became a city” as monasteries sprang up across the region. In 406 the Empress Eudoxia provided the funds for a cathedral for Gaza, and by the end of the sixth century, the celebrated church of St Sergius was built.
The Arab conquest used to be considered a major turning point in the region’s history, but according to many historians and archaeologists who specialise in this period, the conquest is almost invisible archaeologically. Surviving documents from the period indicate that for many years after, Gaza continued as an administrative centre of the region, and Greek-speaking Christians continued to run the bureaucracy. The son and grandson of two of the early chancellors of the Ummayad Caliphs, St John of Damascus, ended his life in the monastery of Mar Saba not very far from Gaza in the Judean desert. In time, the inhabitants of Palestine accepted the language, government and religion of their new masters; but it was a gradual process of transition, over many centuries, not a sudden catastrophic end of civilisation. The Arab conquerors were a small military elite; the local people remained much the same.
The site of Saint Hilarion monastery, Deir al-Balah, June 8, 2022. Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty
Gaza continued to flourish through the Crusader period, when it was given over to the Knights Templar to guard the frontier with Egypt; and even more so after the Mamluks expelled the Crusaders and filled Gaza with fine mosques and caravanserais. During the Ottoman period, Jaffa and Acre took over from Gaza as the most prosperous ports of the region, out of which Galilee cotton and Jaffa oranges were exported; but Gaza remained an important regional centre.
Gaza was the place where the Ottoman army made its stand against the British in the first world war. Here many of the same Ottoman troops who had defeated the British at Gallipoli again held their trenches against a mixed British, Indian and Anzac force, heading north from Egypt, armed with shells tipped with poison gas and the Middle East’s first tanks, shipped over from the Western Front in the hope of a breakthrough. It was only thanks to the flanking movement of the Anzac and Bikaner camel cavalry under General Allenby that Ottoman lines finally fell, at the third battle of Gaza at the beginning of November 1917. On 2 November, the Balfour Declaration was issued in London, changing the future of the territory for ever. By the end of 1948 Gaza was home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the Nakba.
Though Gaza now dominates news bulletins for the worst reasons, it is a place about which we have traditionally learned remarkably little; we are not taught its story in movies or TV documentaries, let alone as part of formal education. Yet it is something we obviously badly need to know in order to grasp current events.
This month sees the publication of several new books addressing that absence. As well as the catalogue of the brilliant Paris exhibition, Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5,000 ans d’histoire (Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History) historian Anne Irfan has just produced an excellent primer, A Short History of the Gaza Strip, while Jean-Pierre Filiu has published a supplement to his wonderfulGaza: A History, called A Historian in Gaza. In it, he writes: “The Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.”All three count as essential reading for those hungry to know more about this ancient territory so as to better understand the current, desperate chapter in its history.
A Short History of the Gaza Strip by Anne Irfan (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
A Historian in Gaza by Jean-Pierre Filiu (C Hurst & Co Publishers, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In Lucifer Descending … encounters with the morning star, In That Howling Infinite followed Lucifer’s long journey from Scripture into theology: from the elusive serpent of Genesis to the rebellious archangel of Christian tradition; from the Book of Job to Isaiah, Ezekiel, the New Testament and, ultimately, to Milton’s magnificent Paradise Lost. It was the story of how a comparatively shadowy biblical adversary gradually became the Prince of Darkness who has haunted the Western imagination for almost two millennia.
But stories, like their protagonists, seldom remain where we leave them. If Lucifer Descending explored how the Lucifer fell from Heaven, this essay asks what happened after he landed.
For Lucifer, it turns out, has enjoyed an extraordinarily successful afterlife. As religious belief has receded across much of the Western world, he has not disappeared. Rather, he has escaped the confines of theology and colonised almost every corner of our culture. He strides through literature, painting, opera, horror, fantasy, cinema, television, popular music and political rhetoric with undiminished confidence.
This is therefore not another essay about Satan as an object of faith. It is an exploration of Lucifer as one of Western civilisation’s most durable cultural archetypes. Why do we continue to invent Dark Lords long after many have ceased to believe in the Devil? Why do our stories seem unable to function without them? Why does the Wild Hunt still thunder across our imagination, why does Old Nick keep turning up in our songs, and why do successive generations remain fascinated by the glamour of the forbidden?
The answers reveal at least as much about ourselves as they do about the Devil.
For, as this essay gradually suggests, Lucifer’s greatest triumph may not have been persuading us that he exists. It may have been persuading us that evil always wears somebody else’s face.
Lucifer descending, Gustave Dore
The Devil Rises
I heard the snake was baffled by his sin He shed his scales to find the snake within But born again is born without a skin The poison enters into everything
Leonard Cohen, Treaty
There is a curious paradox at the heart of Western civilisation. For all the decline in church attendance, one suspects that Lucifer has never really been unemployed.
Heaven may have dismissed him long ago, but literature, painting, music, theatre and cinema hired him almost immediately. Theology gradually misplaced him; popular culture put him back on the payroll. Strip away the horns, the cloven hooves and the sulphurous odour, and he reappears century after century in fresh disguise: the Dark Lord, the Shadow, the Emperor, the Great Corrupter, the smiling tyrant, the master criminal, the “Big Bad”, the villain whose ambitions invariably exceed both his wisdom and his humanity.
In short, Lucifer never really went away. He simply changed costumes.
This is perhaps his greatest triumph. For while belief in a literal Devil has waned across much of the Western world, belief in evil personified has scarcely diminished at all. We remain incurable myth-makers. Every age invents a Prince of Darkness suited to its own anxieties. Medieval Europe imagined hornèd demons lurking in forests and crossroads. The nineteenth century preferred aristocratic vampires and criminal masterminds. The twentieth gave us dictators. The twenty-first has elevated cinematic super-villains into a kind of secular demonology. We may no longer fear Hell in quite the old-fashioned sense, but we still require someone – or something – to embody the darkness against which heroes define themselves.
It is hardly surprising. Stories require conflict. Heroes are admirable, but villains are memorable. The hero must remain consistently virtuous; the villain enjoys all the best speeches, the finest costumes and the greatest dramatic licence. Lucifer himself set the pattern. Even those who have never read Paradise Lost have absorbed Milton’s magnificent creation second-hand. William Blake famously quipped that the Puritan poet “was of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” and one understands precisely what he meant. God issues decrees. Satan delivers soliloquies and strikes power chords.
Milton’s Lucifer was not the grotesque beast of medieval mystery plays. He was intelligent, eloquent, magnificent even in defeat, ruined less by wickedness than by pride. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” may be one of the most quoted lines in English literature precisely because it speaks to something recognisably human. Milton’s Devil is wrong, certainly, but never dull. Every great fictional Dark Lord since has borrowed something from him.
J.R.R. Tolkien would doubtless have resisted the comparison. As a devout Catholic he disliked allegory almost as much as C.S. Lewis embraced it. Yet Sauron stands unmistakably in the Miltonic tradition. He is no mere tyrant but a fallen power, less a personality than a malignant will bent entirely upon domination. Indeed, Sauron scarcely appears in The Lord of the Rings as a character at all. He is an absence, an all-seeing eye, a presence felt rather than seen. Evil has become abstract, bureaucratic almost, no longer dependent upon pitchforks and brimstone but upon surveillance, conquest and absolute control. Lucifer has evolved into totalitarianism.
Sauron’s lieutenant Saruman is perhaps closer to Milton’s original conception. Once wise, once good, corrupted not by appetite but by certainty. Like Lucifer himself, Saruman does not begin as evil. He begins by believing that the ends justify the means. Christopher Lee, who portrayed him so magnificently, understood these ambiguities better than most. There was something appropriate about the actor who had previously embodied Dracula and Rasputin eventually becoming Tolkien’s fallen wizard. Lee spent much of his career giving evil an aristocratic dignity that was infinitely more unsettling than any number of prosthetic horns.
George Lucas followed much the same path. Darth Vader may be the fallen angel, the once-noble knight seduced by power, but the true Lucifer of Star Wars is Emperor Palpatine. Smiling, patient, almost avuncular, he rarely forces anyone to do anything. Instead, he whispers. He flatters. He identifies weaknesses already present and quietly enlarges them. Like the serpent in Eden, he offers knowledge, certainty and power, while allowing his victims to imagine that every decision is entirely their own. Watching the prequel trilogy today, one is struck by how often democracy destroys itself voluntarily. Palpatine scarcely stages a coup. The Republic hands him the keys.
Marvel has travelled a similar road. Thanos does not regard himself as wicked. Quite the reverse. He considers himself the only rational adult in a sentimental universe. Half of all life must perish, he argues, so that the remainder may flourish. His is genocide expressed as arithmetic. That, perhaps, is modern evil in a nutshell. The old Devil tempted souls. Today’s Dark Lord arrives bearing graphs, statistics and PowerPoint slides.
Even Walt Disney understood that darkness is dramatically indispensable. Snow White has her Wicked Queen, Sleeping Beauty her horned Maleficent, and The Lion King its melancholy conspirator Scar, Shakespeare’s Richard III translated into feline form. Disney princes tend to blur into one another. Nobody forgets Cruella De Ville.
Nor is this confined to fairy tales.
Sherlock Holmes required Professor Moriarty, “the Napoleon of Crime”, a title that neatly transformed the “Corsican ogre” into a metaphor for criminal genius. Dracula became immortal not merely because he drank blood but because he represented temptation wrapped in elegance. Hannibal Lecter horrified audiences precisely because he was cultivated enough to discuss Bach and Bordeaux while contemplating cannibalism. Batman’s Joker delights in proving that civilisation itself is only a thin coat of paint over chaos. Voldemort, another heir to Sauron, seeks not merely power but immortality itself, the oldest Luciferian ambition of all.
James Bond, too, would have enjoyed a remarkably brief career had Ian Fleming contented himself with ordinary gangsters. Instead, he gave us Blofeld, Dr No, Goldfinger and a parade of megalomaniacs convinced that humanity’s principal problem was insufficient obedience. They possessed volcanic lairs, Persian cats, improbable weapons and ambitions bordering on the theological. Bond did not merely foil criminals; he repeatedly thwarted men aspiring to become secular gods.
One of the cleverest reinventions of the archetype came from the most unlikely quarter imaginable: a Californian-based television series ostensibly about teenage vampires.
Beneath the wisecracks and high-school melodrama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was an entertainingly sophisticated theological exercise. Each season introduced a new “Big Bad”, the a term creator Joss Weedon coined for whatever apocalyptic menace Buffy happened to be facing. The expression was comic, yet psychologically astute. Stories seem to demand a supreme antagonist around whom lesser evils can organise themselves.
The setting was inspired. Sunnydale High School stood upon a Hellmouth, a literal gateway to infernal realms buried beneath the school library, and an eminently portable metaphor. Adolescence already feels like Hell; why not build the school directly over it? Evil, the series quietly suggested, is never somewhere else. It is not confined to Mordor or the underworld. It bubbles perpetually beneath ordinary life, beneath classrooms, shopping malls, suburban cul-de-sacs and parent-teacher evenings, requiring only the occasional crack in the pavement to emerge. “There’s this thing that happens here, over the hell mouth”, says Buffy, “where the way a thing feels – it kind of starts being that way for real. I’ve seen all these things before – just not all at once”.
Lucifer has hence become less a theological proposition than a dramatic necessity. Every mythology requires its dragon. Every dragon requires its Dark Lord. Every Dark Lord owes something to the Morning Star. And every hero requires a nemesis to defeat and destroy.
Nor do we confine these figures to fiction. Human beings have always displayed a remarkable talent for transforming history into morality plays. Every generation manufactures its own secular Satan. Adolf Hitler has become the universal benchmark against which evil itself is measured. His name no longer belongs solely to history but to mythology. Joseph Stalin joins him, pipe smoke curling above the Gulag like incense from some infernal liturgy. Mao Tse Tung presides over famines of almost biblical proportions. Pol Pot transformed Cambodia into a charnel house. Even the language betrays us. We do not merely describe such men as wicked. We speak of them as monsters, demons, incarnations of evil itself.
Earlier centuries found their Dark Lords elsewhere. Napoleon Bonaparte was the Corsican Ogre, riding across Europe like an Antichrist in cavalry boots. Medieval chroniclers regarded Genghis Khan as divine punishment erupting from the eastern steppe. Rome supplied a gallery of memorable villains – Nero, Caligula, Commodus and Elagabalus – whose reputations, embroidered though some undoubtedly are, have endured for two thousand years because every civilisation likes to imagine that somewhere in its past there strode an emperor who was not merely bad but diabolical.
Then there was Grigori Rasputin, whom we encountered in a recent essay. Mystic, mountebank, holy fool, healer, libertine, political manipulator and reluctant martyr, Rasputin somehow managed to become all things to all people. The beard, the hypnotic stare, the whispered scandals, the astonishing resilience in the face of poison, bullets and icy rivers – no wonder he stared in on of Hammer’s schlocky horror shows.
There is, however, a danger in all this. The more enthusiastically we invest evil in extraordinary individuals, the more confidently the rest of us absolve ourselves. If Hitler is Satan, then we need only reassure ourselves that we are not Hitler. If Sauron dwells in Mordor, then the Shire is safely innocent. It is an attractive proposition, comforting even, but one that both history and literature stubbornly refuse to endorse.
Milton knew better. So did Tolkien. So, in his own deceptively gentle way, did W.H. Auden, who, according to his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, once startled a Sunday School class by asking, “Do you know what the Devil looks like? The Devil looks like me.”
That may be the most unsettling description of Lucifer ever written. For it suggests that the Dark Lord’s final disguise is not the hornèd demon, nor the tyrant, nor the vampire, nor the emperor. It is the ordinary human face reflected back at us from the mirror.
From there, as the old proverb reminds us, it is but a short ride before the Devil takes the reins.
Sauron, the all-seeing eye
The Devil Drives
And now the wheels of heaven stop, you feel the devil’s riding crop. Get ready for the future: it is murder.
Leonard Cohen, The Future
If the Dark Lord gives evil a face, the Devil gives it motion.
There is an old English proverb, first recorded by John Lydgate around 1420, that survives today in abbreviated form: Needs must when the Devil drives. We have largely forgotten the second half, retaining only the resigned “needs must”, yet the original is far richer. It conjures a vivid image of the unfortunate traveller compelled onward by an infernal coachman, driven not by choice but by necessity, passion, fear or circumstance. Shakespeare knew the saying well and put it into the mouth of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well. Six centuries later it still captures something uncomfortable about the human condition. We like to think we are steering our own course. More often than not, someone – or something else – appears to have seized the reins. How often have we heard those righteous souls who have failed to resist carnal temptation plaintively cry “the devil made me do it!”
The Devil, in this tradition, is not so much a ruler as a driver.
American gospel music later turned the proverb into practical theology. “Don’t let the Devil ride,” warned one well-loved spiritual. The explanation followed immediately: “If you let him ride, he’ll want to drive.” It is a neat summary of temptation itself. Evil rarely demands complete surrender at the outset. It asks only for a lift, a compromise, a tiny concession, one small indulgence. Before long, you discover that you have been relegated to the passenger seat.
Author Dennis Wheatley understood the power of this ancient image when he published The Devil Rides Out in 1934. It remains one of the great classics of English supernatural fiction, written at a time when spiritualism, séances and occult societies flourished among polite society between the wars. Wheatley’s Satan is no medieval gargoyle lurking beneath cathedral gargoyles. He rides abroad, active in the world, recruiting disciples, pursuing souls and intruding into drawing rooms where cocktails are served with impeccable manners. Christopher Lee’s magnificent portrayal of the Duc de Richelieu in Hammer’s 1968 adaptation elevated what might otherwise have been Gothic melodrama into something almost Miltonic. Tall, patrician and entirely convincing, Lee battled infernal forces with learning, courage and Latin – unlike Buffy Somer’s high kicks and wisecracks. It may be the only horror film in which civilisation itself, embodied in good breeding and quiet erudition, proves the Devil’s most formidable opponent.
Yet Wheatley was drawing upon something immeasurably older than Christianity, for long before Lucifer acquired horns, antique Europe already knew that when the wind howled through winter forests and clouds raced across a full moon, riders were abroad on The Wild Hunt.
Every northern people seemed to possess its own version. In Scandinavia it thundered across the heavens under the command of Odin himself, one-eyed, cloaked and spear in hand, accompanied by ghostly warriors and spectral wolves. In England the leader became Herne the Hunter, antlers upon his brow, riding through Windsor Forest with baying hounds at his heels. Shakespeare gives him a memorable cameo in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Falstaff disguises himself as the horned hunter beneath the great oak. Whether Herne was once a forgotten woodland god, an Anglo-Saxon spirit or merely local folklore hardly matters. By Elizabethan times everyone knew that one did not linger in the forest after dark when Herne was abroad.
Across the Severn in Wales the Hunt belonged to Gwyn ap Nudd, king of Annwn, the Otherworld, who rode with his fearsome Cŵn Annwn, the white hounds with crimson ears whose baying foretold death. In Brittany and northern France, it became the Mesnée d’Hellequin, the Host of Hellequin, whose mysterious leader eventually lent his name, by one of language’s curious transformations, to the comic Harlequin of the Italian stage. Germany knew the procession under other names; so too did the Low Countries.
The details varied. The essentials did not. A storm. A cavalcade. The dead riding with the living. And woe betide anyone who crossed their path. Sometimes those unfortunate enough to witness the Hunt were swept away forever. Sometimes they were compelled to join it. Sometimes they survived only to wake the following morning miles from home with no memory of the night’s journey. One can almost hear the old proverb whispering through these stories. Needs must when the Devil drives.
The great Norwegian painter Peter Nicolai Arbo captured the legend magnificently in his 1872 canvas Åsgårdsreien – usually rendered in English simply as The Wild Hunt of Odin. It is one of those paintings that appears almost to move before one’s eyes. Odin’s spectral company bursts from the darkness in an explosion of movement. Horses rear. Cloaks stream behind their riders. Women, warriors and phantom hounds tumble through the storm as though the sky itself has become a battlefield. Nothing in the picture is static. The Hunt is motion incarnate, a supernatural force impossible either to resist or escape. Looking upon it, one immediately understands why our ancestors barred their doors when winter winds began to howl.
Åsgårdsreien – The Wild Hunt
The Church, unsurprisingly, appropriated the legend rather than abolishing it. Odin quietly surrendered his command to darker powers. The spectral riders became demons. The horned Herne acquired a suspicious resemblance to the Devil himself. Pagan myth merged seamlessly into Christian cosmology. The Hunt still rode; only its commander had changed.
Or perhaps not. For there is something profoundly Luciferian about the Wild Hunt irrespective of who happens to lead it. It is the embodiment of restless movement, insatiable desire and ceaseless pursuit. The riders never arrive because they are never seeking a destination. They exist only to chase – like temptation itself.
The extraordinary thing is that the Hunt did not perish with the old beliefs. It emigrated. Like so much European folklore, it crossed the Atlantic in the baggage of settlers, adapting itself to new landscapes and fresh imaginations. Somewhere between the Black Forest and the Black Hills, between Sherwood Forest and the Sierra Nevada, the ghostly riders exchanged mail armour for denim, spears for lassos and wolves for cattle.
The Wild Hunt became the Wild West.
No one realised this more completely than Stan Jones. When the Arizona park ranger wrote Ghost Riders in the Sky in 1948, he almost certainly knew he was drawing upon old frontier tales of phantom cattle drives. Whether he realised that those tales themselves descended from a mythology already a thousand years old is another matter. Yet the genealogy is unmistakable. Jones’s doomed cowboys pursuing a phantom herd across thunderclouds are Odin’s riders in Stetsons. Their burning cattle replace the wolves of the north. Their endless pursuit echoes precisely the fate awaiting those medieval hunters unfortunate enough to be swept into the spectral cavalcade.
In That Howling Infinite has paid tribute to this extraordinary song in A cowboy key – how the west was sung, describing it as perhaps the greatest of all cowboy ballads. It deserves the accolade. For all its American trappings, it reaches back through frontier folklore to the Book of Revelation and beyond that to the ancient forests of Europe. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop somewhere in the background, but so too does Herne beneath Windsor’s oak, Gwyn ap Nudd crossing the Welsh hills and Odin hurtling through Scandinavian skies.
It is one of those rare songs in which myth survives almost intact, merely changing hats.
Somewhere between Valhalla and the Rio Grande, the Wild Hunt learned to yodel. And the Devil, one suspects, thoroughly approved.
Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel A bolt of fear went through him as they thundered through the sky For he saw the riders coming hard and he heard their mournful cry
Stan Jones, Ghost Riders in the Sky
It has often been said, only half in jest, that the Devil gets all the best songs.
God, to be fair, has hardly been neglected. He has inspired Gregorian chant, Bach’s Passions, Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation, Verdi’s Requiem, the African-American spiritual, the Welsh hymn, the Gospel choir and enough Christmas carols to keep shopping centres in business from November onwards. Heaven has produced magnificent music.
But Hell swings.
There is something about Old Nick that seems to appeal irresistibly to musicians. He crops up in folk songs, murder ballads, spirituals, blues, country, jazz, rock and heavy metal with a persistence that borders upon the supernatural. One begins to suspect that if Lucifer really was once Heaven’s brightest angel, his expulsion may not have deprived him of music at all. It merely changed the repertoire.
it was not for nothing that Rock and roll was called “the devil’s music”. its driving rhythms, rebellious energy, and provocative dancing directly challenged conservative religious and social norms. Emerging from African American blues, the genre inherited a reputation for sinfulness due to its associations with marginalized spaces, nightlife, and earthy themes
Perhaps rebellion simply has a better rhythm.
The same bargain resurfaced centuries later at a lonely crossroads in Mississippi.
The oldest of these musical bargains belongs, naturally enough, to Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe first dramatised the medieval legend of the ambitious scholar who traded his immortal soul for worldly knowledge and pleasure, Goethe transformed him into one of the great figures of European literature, and Charles Gounod clothed the story in glorious French Romantic opera. Yet in every version it is Mephistopheles who steals the show. Bass-baritones relish the role because villains invariably enjoy the better music. The Devil not only gets the best lines; he often gets the best arias as well.
Whether Robert Johnson actually met Satan one moonlit night sometime in the 1930s is almost entirely beside the point. Legends endure because they express truths that facts cannot. Johnson had been an unremarkable guitarist. He disappeared for a time and returned astonishingly accomplished. Rural gossip supplied the explanation. He had met the Devil at the crossroads and exchanged his soul for musical genius.
Thus, America reinvented Faust,
The crossroads itself is an ancient place of magic in European folklore, where roads – and destinies – the River of Song as the Mississippi has been called, where spirits linger and bargains are struck. The myth crossed the Atlantic with everything else, put on denim overalls, acquired a battered Gibson guitar and gave birth to the Delta Blues.
From there it was only a short journey to Georgia.
Charlie Daniels’ exuberant The Devil Went Down to Georgia is really another version of the old contest tales in which ordinary mortals outwit supernatural adversaries. The Devil, looking for “a soul to steal”, challenges a young fiddler to a musical duel and, for once, comes second. There is something wonderfully democratic about the story. Lucifer may be older than Creation itself, but he can still be shown up by a country boy with a fiddle and sufficient confidence in his own abilities.
English folk music had anticipated the idea centuries earlier in The False Knight Upon the Road. A mysterious stranger repeatedly attempts to intimidate a child with riddles and threats, only to be calmly answered at every turn until the False Knight – widely interpreted as the Devil himself – is finally driven away in defeat. The old stories were surprisingly optimistic. The Devil might be clever, but he was not unbeatable.
Nor, for that matter, was he always entirely sinister.
By the time we reach the twentieth century he has become positively urbane.
The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil remains perhaps the most brilliant reinvention of Lucifer in popular music. Jagger’s narrator is no horned medieval monster but an impeccably dressed gentleman of “wealth and taste”, strolling through history with dry amusement as empires rise, revolutions unfold and humanity repeatedly demonstrates its extraordinary capacity for cruelty. The Devil scarcely claims responsibility for our crimes. He merely observes them with professional interest. It is a profoundly unsettling conceit because the song quietly suggests that mankind requires remarkably little assistance.
Gun’s hectic Race With the Devil, released in the same annus mirabilis of 1968, approaches the old fellow from a different angle altogether. Here the Devil is not the urbane observer but the relentless pursuer, forever hunting, forever closing the distance, echoing once again those ancient riders of the Wild Hunt thundering across medieval skies. The old folklore had merely acquired electric guitars.
Then there is Leonard Cohen.
No modern songwriter returned more often – or more thoughtfully % to biblical imagery. Yet Cohen’s Devil becomes progressively less external and more intimate. In Treaty, the serpent sheds his skin only to discover “the snake within”. Evil is no longer an adversary encountered in lonely wildernesses, but an inheritance carried beneath one’s own skin. In one of his final songs, with characteristic wit, Cohen quietly inverts centuries of iconography: now “the angel’s got a fiddle, the devil’s got a harp.” The celestial and infernal orchestras have exchanged instruments. Nothing, it seems, remains quite where tradition left it.
Freddie Mercury, never knowingly guilty of understatement, transformed Beelzebub into operatic theatre in Bohemian Rhapsody. The Devil appears only fleetingly amid Galileo, Scaramouche and heavenly choirs, yet somehow manages to dominate one of the most extraordinary six minutes in rock history. That, too, seems entirely appropriate. Old Nick has always had impeccable comic timing.
Tom Waits, all gravel and bourbon, frequently sounds as though he has spent an evening drinking with the Devil in some forgotten dockside bar. Nick Cave has made an entire career exploring the uneasy frontier where scripture, murder ballad and Southern Gothic overlap: “He’s a god, he’s a man, he’s a ghost, he’s a guru. They’re whispering his name through this disappearing land. But hidden in his coat is a red right hand”.
Even heavy metal, with its adolescent flirtations with pentagrams and infernal imagery, owes less to genuine Satanism than to the enduring theatrical appeal of Lucifer as the ultimate outsider. The Devil, one suspects, appreciates good publicity wherever he can find it.
Which brings us back to the Wild Hunt.
Stan Jones’s Ghost Riders in the Sky deserves to stand alongside these classics not because it mentions the Devil directly, and scarcely needs to, but because it preserves one of humanity’s oldest supernatural narratives in modern musical dress. Those spectral cowboys pursuing phantom cattle across storm clouds are descendants of Odin’s riders, Herne’s hunters and the Four Horsemen themselves. The song is medieval Europe galloping beneath the vast skies of Arizona. Like all the finest folk songs, it remembers far more than its author probably realised.
How the West Was Sung describes it as perhaps the finest of all cowboy ballads. It is as far removed from cheerful campfire songs of wandering dogies as Kansas is from the Land of Oz. Beneath its Western saddle leather beats the heart of an ancient myth.
And, if I may be forgiven a personal indulgence, somewhere among all these songs sits several of my own.
My first serious encounter with Lucifer in music came not through rock and roll but through Gordon Giltrap’s haunting instrumental Lucifer’s Cage. Introduced to me by an old friend in a London flat sometime in the early 1970s, its title lodged quietly in the imagination for years before eventually emerging, almost unbidden, in a song of my own song of that name. Dante contributed the pillar of ice. Marlowe lent his melancholy. Milton supplied the fallen archangel. The rest belonged to memory, dreams and the peculiar alchemy by which songs occasionally write themselves.
Lucifer appeared again years later in Devil’s Work, though by then he had become something rather different. Summoned before the bar of humanity to answer for every cruelty committed in his name, Satan calmly pleads not guilty. Men, he observes with devastating logic, have proved perfectly capable of atrocity without supernatural assistance. He does not deny admiring the results. He merely disputes authorship.
The old rogue may even have a case. Which perhaps explains why he continues to haunt our music.
Songs, after all, thrive on conflict. They delight in temptation, regret, betrayal, longing, rebellion and redemption – the very emotions that have always formed the Devil’s stock-in-trade. Heaven may provide perfection, but perfection is notoriously difficult to rhyme. Hell, by contrast, offers endless narrative possibilities.
Lucifer may have been expelled from the heavenly choir, but he appears to have landed squarely in the music business. And business, judging by the catalogue, has been remarkably good ever since.
The Devil’s trick
For his is the language of liars
And his is the honour of thieves
And he is the master of eloquence
As the last of the honest men leaves.
Paul Hemphill. Lucifer
The “pillar of ice”, by the wThe oldest image of evil is not always the monster at the gate or the tyrant upon the throne. More often, it is the quiet voice at the shoulder: the tempter, the whisperer, the insinuator who does not command but suggests; who does not force the hand but gently guides it. The devil’s greatest achievement is rarely the invention of falsehood. It is the art of making falsehood appear attractive, sophisticated, inevitable, even virtuous.
C.S. Lewis understood this ancient pattern with remarkable clarity. In The Screwtape Letters, the infernal bureaucracy does not operate through crude declarations of evil. The tempter’s craft is subtler. It lies in rearranging perceptions, encouraging vanity, disguising weakness as strength, and persuading people that they are acting from reason when they are often responding to pride, fashion, fear, or the desire to belong.
The danger, Lewis suggests, is not merely that people hold mistaken ideas. Human beings have always been capable of error. The deeper danger is when ideas become ornaments of identity rather than conclusions reached through reflection. A philosophy becomes attractive because it feels modern, daring, compassionate, rebellious, or intellectually fashionable. The question shifts from “Is this true?” to “What does believing this say about me?”
This is the realm of the whisperer. The whisperer does not need to overthrow reason; he merely needs to distract it. He surrounds the mind with fragments: a little fashionable theory here, a borrowed slogan there, a moral certainty imported from someone else. Contradictions can coexist comfortably because coherence is less important than belonging. The result is not always a carefully constructed worldview, but a collection of convictions assembled from the cultural atmosphere.
The genius of the tempter is that he rarely presents himself as the enemy. He arrives disguised as enlightenment, liberation, sophistication, or courage. He flatters rather than threatens. He tells people they are not merely correct, but among the few who truly understand. The oldest temptation is not simply to do wrong; it is to believe oneself too wise, too moral, or too enlightened to be mistaken.
This brings to mind another great literary figure of the whispering world: Lord Varys, the “Master of Whisperers” in Game of Thrones. Varys is not a demon, nor is he portrayed simply as a villain. His power lies in information, influence, and his ability to move unseen through the corridors of power. He understands that kingdoms are often shaped less by armies than by rumours, perceptions, and carefully planted ideas.. Varys understood the theatre of power; he understood that information itself was a weapon and that every ruler lives inside a carefully constructed reality. His web of informants becomes a metaphor for the invisible forces that govern human affairs
The “Master of Whisperers” is an old archetype. Behind the throne sits the counsellor, the adviser, the confidant who knows that shaping the mind of the ruler can be more powerful than commanding the ruler’s army. In that sense, Varys belongs to the same long tradition as the court intriguer, the Mephistophelean tempter, and the old folkloric figure who appears at the crossroads offering knowledge, power, or forbidden wisdom.
Perhaps that is why the archetype endures. From the serpent in Eden to Mephistopheles, from Shakespeare’s Iago to Varys, the whisperer represents a profound truth about human nature: we are not only creatures who seek truth; we are creatures who seek stories about ourselves. The most dangerous lies are often not those imposed upon us, but those we welcome because they confirm the person we wish to be.
The devil’s trick, then, is not simply deception. It is seduction. It is convincing us that the voice in the shadows is our own.
Satanic Majesties and the lure of the dark side …
Please allow me to introduce myself I’m a man of wealth and taste I’ve been around for a long, long year Stole many a man’s soul and faith
The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Which brings is tangentially to “devil worship”, whether in cosplay or for real, and why has had and continues to exert an attraction to folks of a certain “disposition”. Hence in pop culture, we have The Rolling Stones using the concept to distinguish themselves from the more saccharine (though brilliant) Sergeant Pepper, and the movies – particularly those dealing with the immanence of the Antichrist.
It is a fascinating tangent because “devil worship” has almost never been primarily about the Devil. More often, it is about rebellion, transgression, power, or the seduction of forbidden knowledge. Satan becomes a mirror in which each age sees the things it most fears—or secretly desires.
The attraction begins with the nature of Lucifer himself. Unlike the grotesque medieval devil of horns and pitchforks, Lucifer is the most compelling character in the Christian imagination after Christ. He is beautiful, intelligent, eloquent, proud, charismatic. 17th Century John Milton’s Paradise Lost transformed him into one of literature’s great antiheroes, whose defiant declaration, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”, has echoed through centuries of political revolutionaries, Romantic poets, and rock musicians alike. William Blake famously remarked that Milton “was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Whether or not Blake was right, Milton unintentionally gave Satan much of the best dialogue.
That ambiguity proved irresistible to the Romantics. The poets Byron, Shelley, and later Baudelaire saw Lucifer not simply as the embodiment of evil but as the eternal rebel against authority. One need not approve of Satan to recognise the psychological appeal. Every adolescent has, at some point, imagined themselves misunderstood by a hypocritical world. Lucifer becomes the patron saint of alienation.
This is where “devil worship” divides into several distinct streams.
The first is largely theatrical. Heavy metal, gothic fashion, horror films, occult imagery, black clothing, inverted crosses, and pentagrams function less as professions of faith than as cultural shorthand for danger, independence, and shock. Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Ghost, and countless others have mined this aesthetic. Most participants have little interest in metaphysical evil; they are enjoying the iconography of rebellion.
The Rolling Stones understood this perfectly. In 1967, Their Satanic Majesties Request was less an endorsement of Satanism than a calculated provocation. It was impossible not to hear it as a response to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Where the Beatles embraced colourful optimism and psychedelic innocence, the Stones offered something darker, more decadent, more dangerous. Their image became one of sex, drugs, excess and moral ambiguity.
The following year they released Sympathy for the Devil, perhaps the greatest popular song ever written from Satan’s perspective. Yet the song is not a hymn to evil. Jagger’s Lucifer is an urbane observer of human history, politely introducing himself while recounting the crimes of mankind. The genius lies in the reversal. The Devil scarcely needs to tempt us; humanity supplies ample atrocities of its own. As the refrain insists, “after all, it was you and me.” The devil becomes less the author of evil than its ironic narrator.
Then there is genuine religious Satanism, which is rarer than popular imagination assumes.
Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, founded in 1966, was largely atheistic. Satan was treated as a symbol of individualism, rational self-interest, scepticism toward religious authority, and personal freedom rather than as a literal supernatural being. In many ways it inverted Christian morality without necessarily believing in Christian cosmology.
Far more obscure are small groups that genuinely venerate Satan as a real spiritual being. They exist, but their numbers have always been tiny. The “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s vastly exaggerated their influence, fuelled by moral panic, unreliable testimony, and sensationalist media.
More enduring has been the cinematic Satan.
Modern horror discovered that the Devil works best not as a monster but as an absence – an invisible intelligence corrupting ordinary life. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) suggested evil could inhabit respectable Manhattan apartments. The Exorcist (1973) brought demonic possession into a suburban family, terrifying audiences because faith itself seemed uncertain. The Omen (1976) imagined the Antichrist not as a horned beast but as an innocent-looking child quietly ascending to political power. The horror lay precisely in the inversion: evil wearing the face of innocence.
It seemed appropriate that The Devil’s address was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These films appeared during an era of collapsing confidence – in churches, governments, families, and institutions. Watergate, Vietnam, social upheaval, the sexual revolution: Western culture was asking whether the old moral certainties still held. The Antichrist became a metaphor for the fear that civilisation itself might contain the seeds of its own destruction.
The Omen (1976)
The fascination continues because Satan remains one of Western culture’s richest symbols. He can signify tyranny or liberation, temptation or freedom, narcissism or resistance, depending on the storyteller. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, he embodies humanity’s perennial temptation to cross boundaries simply because they exist.
Psychology adds another layer. Carl Jung argued that every personality possesses a “shadow” – those impulses we deny or repress. Healthy people acknowledge their shadow rather than pretend it does not exist. Much popular engagement with Satanic imagery can be understood as an exploration of that shadow. Horror allows us to confront evil at a safe distance. Rock music permits us to flirt with darkness while remaining within the bounds of performance. It is ritualised transgression.
The danger, however, comes when performance ceases to be performance. Nietzsche warned that “he who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.” Jung similarly cautioned that confronting the shadow is not the same as identifying with it. One may explore darkness without enthroning it.
Perhaps that is why the Devil remains culturally immortal. God asks for worship; Satan offers fascination. God commands obedience; Satan whispers autonomy. God speaks of redemption; Satan promises self-realisation without limits. Whether one believes in him literally or not, Lucifer continues to embody one of humanity’s oldest temptations: not simply to do evil, but to imagine ourselves beyond the distinction between good and evil.
There is an irony here that would not have been lost on the medieval theologians. Much of what passes for “Satanism” in modern culture is less a rejection of Christianity than a backhanded tribute to it. The Devil has meaning only in a civilisation shaped by the biblical story. As Christianity’s cultural influence has waned, Satan has often survived more successfully than the saints. He has become detached from theology and reborn as an endlessly adaptable icon—part Romantic rebel, part existential outsider, part Hollywood villain, part rock star.
For all the glamour, however, the traditional Christian understanding ends with an unexpectedly mundane observation. Satan’s greatest trick is not horns, black masses, or spectacular evil. It is persuading us that evil is glamorous, liberating, sophisticated, or somehow more interesting than goodness. The Devil, in this view, is the supreme salesman: he packages pride as freedom, selfishness as authenticity, and rebellion as wisdom. His marketing, one might say, has always been better than his product.
That may explain why, from Milton to Mick Jagger, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Omen, Lucifer continues to stride across our cultural stage. The costumes change with every generation, but the role remains the same: the eternal seducer, inviting us to peek over the edge – not always to push us off, but to persuade us that the view from the abyss is somehow more exciting than the long, ordinary climb toward the light.
Crossing the Threshold
It was in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form “Come in, ” she said “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
Bob Dylan
There is an old rule that appears again and again in the folklore of Europe. A vampire, however ancient or powerful, cannot cross the threshold of a home unless invited. It is a curious limitation for a creature that can command wolves, transform into mist, mesmerise its victims and seemingly defy death itself. Yet before the simplest cottage door, all that supernatural power comes to nothing. It must wait. It must ask. Someone within must choose to open the door.
The convention has endured from the pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We accept it almost without question because, beneath the gothic trappings, it expresses something profoundly human. The threshold is more than wood and stone. It is the boundary between safety and danger, innocence and experience, trust and betrayal. To cross it without permission would be mere violence. To be invited across is something altogether more unsettling.
The ancient motif has not disappeared from contemporary storytelling. John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In, and the haunting 2008 Swedish film that followed, take the old vampire prohibition and transform it into a moral question. The issue is no longer simply whether we invite someone across the threshold, but whether we possess the wisdom to know whom we are inviting. Every act of welcome carries the possibility of grace or ruin. The threshold remains sacred because, once crossed, neither host nor guest is quite the same again.
Perhaps this explains why the Devil, in so many traditions, is less a conqueror than a seducer. Lucifer does not usually arrive with an army at his back. He comes with a question, a promise, a whispered doubt. In Eden, he offers knowledge. In the wilderness, he offers power. In Goethe’s Faust, he offers fulfilment. The bargain changes with the age, but the method rarely does. The invitation is always voluntary. The victim believes the choice is entirely his own.
John Milton understood this better than most. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s greatest victory is not won on the battlefield but in the imagination. He persuades others that rebellion is freedom, that pride is dignity, that disobedience is enlightenment. His triumph lies not in overpowering his enemies but in teaching them to mistake temptation for liberation.
This is one of the oldest insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Evil rarely appears wearing its own face. It arrives clothed in reason, justice, beauty, necessity or compassion. It flatters before it threatens. It persuades before it commands. It waits patiently upon the threshold until someone inside unlatches the door.
That ancient intuition has never really left us. Even in a largely secular age, our stories continue to insist that darkness cannot simply seize us. Dracula must be welcomed. The Ring must be claimed. The White Witch tempts Edmund with enchanted sweetness. Darth Vader invites Luke to join him. Hannibal Lecter enters Clarice Starling’s mind long before he ever escapes his cell. The forms change, but the pattern remains remarkably constant. The greatest victories of darkness are achieved not by force but by consent.
Perhaps this is why these stories continue to resonate. They are not really about vampires or devils at all. They are about us. We like to imagine that evil comes from somewhere beyond the horizon, an alien force that erupts into ordinary lives. Folklore suggests otherwise. It waits politely outside, asking only to be admitted. More often than we care to acknowledge, we are the ones who turn the handle.
It is a disturbing thought, for it shifts the battleground. The struggle between good and evil is no longer fought in distant heavens between angels and demons. It takes place at the threshold of every human heart. The decisive moment is not when the Dark Lord appears, but when we recognise the quiet voice that says, Just this once. No one will know. You deserve this. Come with me.
And that raises an even more uncomfortable possibility. If the Devil depends upon our invitation, if the darkness enters because we allow it to enter, then perhaps the most frightening encounter is not with some horned apparition lurking beyond the doorway.
The dark magic of Fairy Tales
And what hills, what hills are those, my love
Those hills so dark and low?
Those are the hills of hell, my love
Where you and I must go
House Carpenter (The Daemon Lover), Laurence Price (1657)
Perhaps this is why fairy tales have proved so enduring. Not the diminutive winged fairies of modern fantasy, nor the escapist worlds of contemporary fiction, but the old literary tales of Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and the countless anonymous storytellers whose voices echo through the centuries. These were never merely stories for children. They were repositories of collective memory, preserving in symbolic form those hard truths about human nature that every generation must rediscover for itself.
Their lessons are remarkably consistent. Do not wander carelessly from the path. Beware the stranger whose charm conceals darker intentions. Be wary of gifts that appear too generous, bargains that seem too easy, promises that flatter your deepest desires. Little Red Riding Hood trusts the Wolf. Hansel and Gretel are tempted by sweetness. Bluebeard forbids the one door that curiosity cannot resist. Snow White accepts the poisoned apple from a smiling hand. Again and again, the stories remind us that evil rarely presents itself as evil. It arrives disguised as opportunity, pleasure, beauty, knowledge or kindness.
Yet alongside these literary fairy tales runs an older and stranger tradition, carried not in children’s books but in the folk songs and ballads of the Celtic lands. Here the threshold leads not to vampires or devils but to Faërie, that mysterious realm which is neither wholly benevolent nor wholly malign, but profoundly Other.
This is not the miniature world of charming sprites and decorative enchantment that later ages would create, but the older Faerie of folklore: a place of wonder and peril, beauty and terror, where the boundaries between the human world and the unknown become uncertain. It is the realm Tolkien described in On Fairy-Stories not as an escape into childish fantasy, but as an encounter with a deeper reality at the edge of the human imagination.
The old ballads return to this theme with remarkable persistence. In Tam Lin, Janet ventures into the haunted wood of Carterhaugh and confronts the Fairy Queen herself to reclaim the man she loves [There’s a wonderful recounting of the story here in this entertaining blog post. In Thomas the Rhymer, the poet follows the Queen of Elfland beneath the Eildon Hills, exchanging the familiar world for one where time and truth obey altogether different laws. What is it about Fairy Queens. Something to do with Lilith, who we introduced in Lucifer Descending? And in the haunting ballad of The House Carpenter, often known as The Daemon Lover, a mysterious stranger returns from the past, offering riches, adventure and escape from an ordinary life. The woman accepts his invitation, only to discover too late that she has embarked upon a voyage from which there will be no safe return. There is a fine version of House Capenter by Tim and Molly Obrien at the end of this article,
Whether these enigmatic, supernatural figures are fairies, spirits or the Devil himself is almost beside the point. They belong to that older landscape of myth where temptation rarely appears in monstrous form. It comes instead as beauty, longing, nostalgia or desire – the whispered promise that happiness lies just beyond the next horizon. The threshold is crossed willingly, the protagonist stepping beyond the known world into a place where the he or she returns changed, if they return at all; and the cost is understood only when, as in House Carpenter, the familiar shore has disappeared from sight.
Tam Lin and the Faery Host.Stephanie Pui-Mun Law
The danger is not always wickedness, but enchantment itself: the loss of home, identity, memory and the comforting certainties of ordinary life. The Fair Folk do not necessarily seek to destroy mortals; their peril lies in their indifference to human limits and human time. They belong to an older order of existence, one that fascinates precisely because it cannot be reduced to our categories of good and evil.
Like Lucifer, the Folk of Faerie seldom arrive as monsters. They are beautiful, alluring and irresistible. They invite rather than compel. The traveller accepts shelter for a night, follows a haunting melody into the greenwood, or rides with a mysterious stranger beneath the moon, only to awaken in a world where familiar landmarks have vanished and time itself has become unmoored. The old ballads understood, as surely as the theologians, that the most perilous journeys begin not with violence but with invitation.
It is a vision that would have been familiar to Tolkien, to Yeats and to the anonymous singers who carried these stories through generations: Faërie is not a place of escape from reality, but a place where reality is seen more clearly. It reminds us that mystery still exists, that wonder can be dangerous, and that every threshold crossed carries the possibility of transformation.
That is why these tales continue to speak to us long after we have ceased believing in enchanted forests, wicked witches, talking beasts or the hidden kingdoms beneath the hills. Their monsters and enchantments are symbols, and symbols possess a curious longevity. The Wolf is not simply a wolf; he is deception. The Witch is not merely an old woman in the woods; she is temptation. The Dragon is not just a beast to be slain; it is fear itself. The Fair Folk are not simply supernatural beings; they embody the irresistible allure of the unknown, the longing to escape the ordinary, and the price that is so often paid for crossing forbidden thresholds. Like Lucifer himself, they endure because they give form to forces that are otherwise difficult to describe.
The genius of these stories lies in their refusal to preach. They do not offer philosophical arguments or theological treatises. Instead, they invite us to recognise ourselves. They speak in the language of metaphor, where wisdom lingers long after the details have faded from memory. We remember the path through the forest, the forbidden door, the poisoned fruit, the moonlit crossroads and the welcoming hearth because they are landmarks within the landscape of our own lives.
Perhaps that is why humanity has never abandoned these tales. We do not return to them because we believe that vampires cannot cross a threshold uninvited, that wolves converse with little girls, or that the Queen of Elfland still rides abroad on Halloween. We return because they express, with unsettling clarity, something we know instinctively but are reluctant to admit: the greatest dangers seldom arrive by force. More often, they are welcomed. The oldest monsters ask permission before they enter, and the hand that lifts the latch is usually our own.
If that is true, then the threshold is not merely the doorway of a cottage, a castle or a haunted house. It is the boundary of the self. The decisive struggle is not between angels and demons in some distant heaven, but within every human heart. The Dark Lord may wait outside, but someone must always open the door.
And when we ask who it was that welcomed him in, we find ourselves confronted by the most disquieting image of all: a face in the mirror.
The Face in the Mirror
So where, finally, does all this leave Lucifer?
After all the centuries, all the sermons and theological arguments, all the paintings, sculptures, poems, novels, films and songs, we are left with a rather unsettling possibility: perhaps the Devil’s greatest achievement was not persuading humanity that he existed, but persuading humanity that evil always belonged somewhere else.
The enduring appeal of Lucifer lies partly in his usefulness. He gives us somewhere to place the things we find hardest to explain about ourselves. When the world becomes cruel, when individuals commit acts of extraordinary brutality, when societies descend into hatred and violence, we instinctively look for a monster. We want a face, a name, a single embodiment of wickedness upon whom we can project all that we fear and despise. The serpent in Eden, the horned tempter at the crossroads, the Dark Lord in his fortress, the tyrant in his palace: these figures offer a reassuring simplicity. Defeat the villain, destroy the source of corruption, restore the natural order, and the world is made whole again.
History, however, has rarely been so obliging.
The twentieth century, the most technologically advanced age humanity had yet created, also produced some of the most terrible examples of human cruelty. It did not require supernatural intervention. It manufactured its own infernos through ideology, bureaucracy and obedience. The great crimes of the modern age were not committed by demons emerging from the shadows, but by human beings who believed themselves to be serving higher purposes. The machinery of death was designed not only by fanatics but by administrators; not only by monsters but by ordinary men who convinced themselves that their actions were necessary, inevitable or even virtuous.
This was the disturbing insight behind Hannah Arendt’s famous reflections on Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil”. Evil did not always announce itself with theatrical menace. It did not always arrive wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork. Sometimes it appeared in a grey suit, spoke in measured tones and filled out forms. Sometimes it hid behind procedure, ideology and obedience. The most frightening villains are not always those who know they are evil, but those who have persuaded themselves that they are doing good.
The Devil, one suspects, would have appreciated the irony.
For centuries humanity has blamed him for our darkest impulses, yet he might reasonably argue that he has often been given rather more credit than he deserves. He has been accused of starting wars, corrupting rulers, tempting sinners and poisoning societies, but mankind has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for invention when it comes to cruelty. Lucifer may have whispered in the ear, but humanity has frequently supplied the imagination, the ambition and the machinery.
This is the argument at the heart of my own earlier song Devil’s Work, where I imagined Lucifer brought before the tribunal of humanity to answer for all that had been done in his name. His defence was not that he was innocent in any moral sense, but that mankind had misunderstood his role. He was the convenient explanation, the eternal scapegoat, the mythical culprit upon whom humanity could place the burden of its own failings. The tyrants, the torturers and the conquerors had not required his instruction. They had acted according to their own desires, their own fears and their own visions of power.
Lucifer’s argument, uncomfortable as it may be, contains a warning. If we imagine evil solely as something external, we risk ignoring the darker possibilities within ourselves. We are comforted by the idea that the Devil is someone else: the enemy, the stranger, the fanatic on the other side of the border, the person whose beliefs we find abhorrent. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that the line between righteousness and cruelty is not always as clearly marked as we would like to believe.
The old proverb warns us, “Don’t let the Devil ride, for if he rides long enough, he will want to drive.” But perhaps the deeper lesson is that the Devil does not always need to seize the reins. Sometimes we hand them over willingly, convinced that we are travelling towards some noble destination.
This is why Milton’s Lucifer remains such a powerful creation. The genius of Paradise Lost was not that it gave us a monster, but that it gave us a personality. Milton’s Satan is seductive because he possesses qualities we recognise: intelligence, ambition, courage, eloquence and a fierce sense of grievance. His tragedy is not that he lacks greatness, but that greatness becomes corrupted by pride. The brightest of angels falls because he cannot accept that he is not the centre of the universe.
And perhaps that is why Lucifer continues to fascinate us. He is not merely the personification of evil. He is the personification of self-deception. He represents the dangerous human capacity to transform ambition into destiny, resentment into righteousness and cruelty into necessity. He is the voice that assures every Dark Lord, from Sauron “in the land Mordor where the shadows lie”, to the tyrants of history, that he is not the villain of his own story.
W.H. Auden understood this with characteristic precision. The story is told that, after his return to the Anglican faith in which he had been raised, he once asked a Sunday school class if they knew what the Devil looked like. The expected answer was probably some variation of the traditional image: horns, tail, pitchfork and sulphurous breath. Instead, Auden replied: “The Devil looks like me.”
Whether the anecdote is exact or embellished, its truth is unmistakable. It captures something that theologians, poets and philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. The Devil is frightening not because he is alien, but because he is familiar. He does not merely lurk in some distant infernal kingdom. He exists in the ordinary human capacity for vanity, cruelty, resentment and self-justification.
Which brings us back to Mick Jagger’s immortal introduction: “Please allow me to introduce myself.” The Devil who appears in Sympathy for the Devil is not a medieval demon but a sophisticated observer of history, a gentleman who has watched empires rise and fall, revolutions become tyrannies and ideals become excuses for violence. His greatest trick is not that he causes humanity’s crimes, but that he knows humanity is perfectly capable of committing them without his assistance.
Perhaps that is why Lucifer refuses to disappear.
Religions may change. Churches may empty. Old cosmologies may fade. Yet the questions that created Lucifer remain stubbornly alive. Why do human beings seek power? Why do we justify cruelty? Why do we convince ourselves that our own darkness is righteous? Why do we so often recognise evil most clearly in others while overlooking it within ourselves?
These are not merely theological questions. They are human questions.
Lucifer survives because he is more than a devil. He is a metaphor for the eternal struggle between our aspirations and our appetites, between the angels we imagine ourselves to be and the creatures we sometimes become.
He falls from Heaven in the old stories. He rises again in every generation’s imagination. He changes his name, his appearance and his costume. He becomes Satan, Mephistopheles, Sauron, Vader, Palpatine, the Joker, the Big Bad, the outlaw, the rebel, the rock star and the shadow at the edge of the road.
But perhaps his most enduring incarnation is the simplest: He has the potential to be face in the mirror.
René Magritte, Not to be Reproduced (1937)
Coda: The Devil’s Human Victims
One final reflection. For all the glamour that Lucifer has acquired in literature, music and popular culture, there is another story—far less entertaining and infinitely more tragic—that shadows his long ascent through the Western imagination.
If the Devil has inspired some of our greatest poetry, our darkest cinema and our most provocative rock music, belief in his earthly agents has also left a trail of blood.
The medieval world certainly knew religious persecution, but it was during the supposedly enlightened ages of the Renaissance and the Reformation that Europe’s obsession with Satan reached its murderous zenith. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, tens of thousands of people—overwhelmingly women, though not exclusively—were executed as witches. Catholics and Protestants alike proved equally susceptible to the conviction that the Devil walked among them, recruiting servants through pacts, sabbaths and sorcery. Learned judges, theologians and magistrates, armed with books such as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, lent intellectual respectability to fear, while torture transformed suspicion into confession. The Renaissance, which celebrated reason and rediscovered classical learning, was paradoxically also an age of extraordinary credulity.
Nor was Europe alone in projecting the image of the Devil onto those it neither understood nor trusted. Across the Middle East, minority faiths have long borne the burden of misunderstanding. The Yazidis, whose reverence for Melek Taus—the Peacock Angel—has repeatedly been misrepresented as “devil worship”, have endured centuries of persecution, culminating in the genocidal campaign waged by ISIS in 2014. The Druze, too, because of the esoteric nature of their beliefs, have often been regarded with suspicion and, at various times, suffered discrimination and violence at the hands of those who judged them through the lens of orthodoxy rather than understanding. Similar accusations have echoed through history against countless other minorities, where ignorance and fear have proved more potent than theology.
The pattern is painfully familiar. Societies under stress seek an enemy within. The Devil rarely appears in person; instead, he is said to wear the face of the outsider, the dissenter, the heretic, the foreigner, the eccentric woman living on the edge of the village, or the obscure community whose customs remain mysterious. To accuse another of serving Satan has often been less a statement of faith than a licence to persecute.
There is a profound irony here. In the biblical narrative, Satan is ha-satan—the Accuser. Yet throughout history it has been human beings who have most enthusiastically assumed that role. Convinced they were defending God against the Devil, they have inflicted upon one another torments that no demon could have devised more effectively.
Perhaps that is the final paradox of Lucifer Ascending. The Devil’s greatest triumph has never been to persuade people to worship him. Such cases have always been vanishingly rare. His more enduring legacy has been to persuade men and women that they alone possess absolute certainty about who serves the powers of darkness. Once that conviction takes hold, compassion yields to righteousness, neighbours become enemies, and persecution begins with the comforting belief that one is acting in the service of Good.
Milton gave Lucifer the finest speeches. The Romantics made him a hero. Hollywood turned him into an icon. Rock music made him fashionable. Yet history offers a quieter, sadder lesson. The true tragedy of the Devil is not found in black masses or satanic cults, but in the countless innocent lives destroyed by those who imagined they could see him reflected in the faces of others.
And so the story comes full circle. The mirror in which we thought we glimpsed the Prince of Darkness reveals, instead, ourselves, and what began, for me, as a literary diversion, a frolic through mythology, theology and popular culture, has ended somewhere altogether less comfortable.
I had imagined this essay as an exploration of one of Western civilisation’s most enduring characters: Lucifer as rebel, tempter, antihero and cultural icon; the Devil of Milton and Goethe, of Blake and Baudelaire, of The Rolling Stones, Hollywood and heavy metal. It was, at first, an exercise in intellectual curiosity – a walk through the darker galleries of our collective imagination. Yet, as so often happens, the journey led elsewhere.
For behind the poetry, the music and the mythology lay a far more sobering truth. The Devil’s greatest appearances have rarely been in cathedrals, black masses or horror films, but in history itself: in witch trials, inquisitions, pogroms, persecutions and genocides, wherever one group has become convinced that another is not merely mistaken, but evil incarnate.
The realisation is a melancholy one. Perhaps Lucifer’s most enduring triumph has never been to persuade humanity to believe in him, nor even to worship him, but to persuade us that we know precisely where evil resides – and that it is always somewhere else.
That is a comforting thought. It is also one of the most dangerous.
In the end, I have come to suspect that the enduring power of the Lucifer story lies not in what it tells us about the Devil, but in what it reveals about ourselves. Every generation recreates him in its own image. Every age discovers him in its chosen enemies. Every certainty carries within it the temptation to become accusation.
What began as a fancy has ended as a cautionary tale. And, perhaps, that was the story waiting to be told all along.
Lucifer, star of the morning Lucifer, prince of the night Lucifer falling through darkness Lucifer cast from the light.
Lucifer sits in his wasteland Trapped in the cage of his pride The sirens of importunate circumstance Reclining in ranks by his side Plots he has made, so ingenuous. Dangerous follies and schemes For he has stage-managed quite strenuous Drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.
Lucifer frets in the wasteland Locked in a pillar of ice We know of this only to well We have visited him there once or twice For his is the language of liars And his is the honour of thieves And he is the master of eloquence As the last of the honest men leaves.
Lucifer crawls from the wasteland No solace or peace or rest. For he has corrupted the wisest And he has co-opted the best. And all that is good has since vanished And with it, the fair and the true And the silences hurting his demon heart Are haunting, haunting you.
And the road that winds out of Meggido Is the path that leads to the pit For Lucifer prizes a web of disguises He merely selects one to fit. And the road that runs down to Jericho Is the path that leads him to you And the paradox searing his demon soul Is hunting, hunting you.
So make you no truce with Lucifer Lucifer of fiery breath For Lucifer is treachery And treachery is death.
Lucifer, star of the morning Lucifer, prince of the night Lucifer falling through darkness Lucifer cast from the light.
America is a country where you can drive from Damascus to Jerusalem via Jericho and Bethlehem without leaving the United States. Its map is littered with biblical names – geography of faith transplanted onto a new continent.
That was no accident. From the Puritans’ “city upon a hill” to Manifest Destiny and today’s Christian nationalism, Americans have repeatedly imagined their country as something more than a nation: a providential project, a New Jerusalem, a civilisation with a sacred inheritance.
But there is another America – the constitutional America, deliberately wary of the fusion of church and state; the pluralist America in which Christianity is one inheritance among many; and the America whose power is increasingly viewed abroad with scepticism.
This essay explores the curious convergence of a renewed intellectual interest in Christianity and Western civilisation, the muscular Christianity of the contemporary American Right, the crusader imagery of its warriors, the spectacle of the television evangelist, and the extraordinary political theology surrounding the Trump era.
At the heart of it is a simple question: what happens when a nation with immense material power begins to clothe that power in sacred language?
New Jerusalem
Look at a map of the United States and you can almost read the Bible in the place names. Bethlehem appears here, Jerusalem there; Jericho, Damascus, Nazareth, Salem, Shiloh, Zion, Hebron, Canaan, Goshen, Galilee, Gilead and Lebanon are scattered across the American landscape. Some are little more than dots on a map; others grew into substantial towns and cities. Together they form something more than a collection of quaint biblical echoes. They constitute a kind of geography of faith: a continent renamed, in part, through the vocabulary of Scripture.
America did not merely settle a new continent. It imagined itself within an ancient story.
The idea goes back to the earliest European settlers, particularly the Puritans, whose understanding of the New World was saturated with the language of Exodus, covenant, wilderness and the Promised Land. The voyage across the Atlantic could be imagined as an escape from bondage. The wilderness became a place of testing. The new settlement could become a covenanted community. America was not simply somewhere to live; it might become somewhere to begin again.
John Winthrop’s famous 1630 sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, gave the idea one of its enduring metaphors: the new community would be “as a city upon a hill”, watched by the world. The original meaning was less a declaration of American superiority than a warning about American responsibility. A people claiming a covenant with God would be judged by how it behaved.
Over time, however, the warning became a boast. The city upon the hill became the shining city upon the hill; the beacon became a claim to exceptionalism; and the American experiment acquired an increasingly providential character. The United States came to imagine itself not merely as a nation among nations but as a nation with a special mission.
This is one reason the idea of a New Jerusalem has such a deep resonance in the American imagination. The Book of Revelation promises a new heaven and a new earth, with the New Jerusalem descending from heaven. The old order passes away; the world is renewed; God dwells among humanity. It is the ultimate story of restoration.
America was, in a secular and political sense, another version of the same story: the old world left behind, a new world discovered, history apparently offering a second chance.
Europe had its cathedrals, dynasties, wars and accumulated centuries. America had the wilderness and the future.
And the wilderness was not empty.
That is where the mythology becomes more complicated. The promised land was already inhabited. The New Jerusalem was built through the displacement and dispossession of Native peoples. The language of Providence accompanied conquest. Manifest Destiny transformed territorial expansion into something that could be understood not simply as geopolitical ambition but as providential destiny.
The American frontier was therefore conquered with the Bible as much as the gun. The gun supplied the means; the Bible supplied, for many, the story.
This should not be reduced to cynical propaganda. Many of the people who settled the frontier genuinely believed that Providence was guiding them. They read their lives through Scripture. They named their settlements after biblical places. They understood victory and defeat, drought and harvest, migration and death within a scriptural framework. The preacher and the gunfighter could inhabit the same cultural universe.
The extraordinary thing is how durable that religious imagination has proved. The United States has repeatedly retold its national story in the language of fall, decline, threat, renewal and redemption. The names and metaphors change, but the narrative structure persists.
America sins; America suffers; America forgets itself; America is threatened; America awakens; America is restored.
It is almost a biblical narrative translated into political mythology.
From the city on the hill to muscular Christianity
This is the historical backdrop against which the contemporary revival of Christian language in American conservatism needs to be understood. It did not begin with Donald Trump, nor is it reducible to the phenomenon now labelled “Christian nationalism”. There has always been an American civil religion in which God, nation, freedom, sacrifice and destiny overlap.
What is new is the intensity with which some contemporary conservatives are seeking to recover Christianity not simply as private belief but as an explicit source of civilisational identity.
There has been, in parallel, an intellectual rediscovery of the Christian inheritance among thinkers who are not conventionally understood as theologians. British historian and co-host of the popular podcast The Rest is History, Tom Holland’s Dominion is perhaps the best-known example. His argument is essentially historical: many of the moral assumptions that modern secular Westerners regard as self-evidently universal – the dignity of the individual, the moral significance of the weak, equality before God, concern for the marginalised and suspicion of arbitrary power – were profoundly shaped by Christianity. See in In That Howling Infinite, Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion. The illustration at the head of this essay is taken from the cover of this thought-provoking book.
Historian Niall Ferguson and others have approached the question from somewhat different directions, examining the decline of Western confidence, the institutions and habits that made the West successful, and the possibility that societies can lose the cultural foundations that sustain them.
There is much to respect in this argument. Christianity did profoundly shape the moral and intellectual architecture of Western civilisation. To deny that is to indulge in a curious form of historical amnesia. But there is a distinction worth preserving between Christianity as an inheritance and Christianity as a political identity.
The West is Christian in its historical formation, but it is not only Christian. It is also Greek and Roman, Jewish and Islamic in important respects, Renaissance and Reformation, Enlightenment and scientific, liberal and socialist. Its civilisation emerged through argument as much as inheritance. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the West may be its capacity to argue with itself.
The danger begins when recognition of the Christian inheritance becomes a claim to Christian superiority, and when civilisational confidence becomes civilisational self-certainty.
For there is an awkward historical fact that every honest account of Western civilisation has to accommodate: the civilisation that produced the Sermon on the Mount also produced religious persecution, slavery, colonialism, racial theories, imperial conquest and industrialised warfare. It proclaimed universal human dignity while repeatedly deciding that some humans were more equal than others.
The West has produced some extraordinary moral ideals. It has also repeatedly failed to live up to them. That is not an argument against the ideals. Quite the reverse. It is an argument for taking them seriously.
JD Vance, Marco Rubio and the recovery of a sacred inheritance
The contemporary American conservative project – propagated by the current Us administration- therefore has an interesting intellectual spectrum.
At one end is the civilisational argument: the West has forgotten its inheritance and must recover confidence in the ideas and institutions that made it what it is. Christianity is not necessarily proposed as a state religion but as the moral and cultural foundation of Western civilisation.
The Catholic dimension is particularly interesting. The conversion of vice-president JD Vance, for example, has given his political thought an intellectual vocabulary that differs from the older Reaganite fusion of individual liberty, free markets and traditional morality. Catholic social thought permits a critique of atomised individualism and places greater emphasis upon family, community, solidarity, responsibility and the common good.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s formulation is similarly civilisational. His argument for Western renewal encompasses reindustrialisation, secure borders, a more restrained conception of the international order and, most importantly, recognition of what he describes as the Christian “sacred inheritance”.
This is not necessarily the same thing as theocracy. It is an argument that a civilisation requires more than institutions and material prosperity. It needs a moral vocabulary, a sense of purpose and some conception of the good.
That proposition is not absurd. Indeed, the secular West has been wrestling with precisely this problem for decades: What happens when a society loses the stories that once gave meaning to sacrifice, obligation, family, citizenship and responsibility?
But then comes the other end of the spectrum: muscular Christianity.
Come the Crusader
Here the intellectual argument becomes physical.
The language is martial. The imagery is martial. The body itself becomes part of the message: warrior tattoos, biblical inscriptions, fighter jets, missiles, military ceremony, prayer and the rhetoric of providence.
The Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s invocation of the Psalm, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle”, is emblematic. Christianity is no longer merely being invoked as the moral inheritance of a civilisation. It is being placed beside the instruments of American military power.
There is a long tradition of Christian soldiers, Christian chaplains and religiously motivated warriors. Christianity has never been pacifist in any simple historical sense. The just-war tradition emerged precisely because Christians had to confront the moral problem of political violence.
But just-war thinking is an attempt to restrain power. It is not a licence to sanctify it. The distinction is crucial.
A soldier may quite properly pray before battle. A soldier may believe that God gives him courage. But when the institutions of the state begin to present military action in explicitly sacred terms, a different question arises: is God being invoked as a source of personal conscience, or as a source of political legitimacy?
The difference between “I believe this war is just” and “God has sanctioned this war” is enormous. The first is political conviction. The second approaches theological authority.
And once the military becomes wrapped in sacred language, the danger is that the moral uncertainty inherent in war disappears. The enemy is no longer merely an adversary whose motives and humanity must be understood. He becomes an obstacle in a providential drama.
That is where the crusader metaphor becomes more than colourful rhetoric. The crusader did not merely fight. He fought under a sacred sign.
Television evangelists and the politics of spectacle
There is another strand of American religious culture that belongs in this story: the television evangelist.
The old televangelists perfected a distinctive synthesis of faith and spectacle. Religion became mass entertainment, personal testimony became political mobilisation, the preacher became a celebrity and the audience became a constituency. The language was often intensely personal: belief, victory, persecution, redemption, prosperity, enemies and deliverance.
It is difficult not to see an echo of that culture in contemporary American politics.
President Donald Trump is not, in any conventional sense, an ideological theologian. He is transactional, improvisational and instinctively theatrical – and narcissistic, vindictive and profane to boot. His politics are based less upon a coherent doctrine than upon loyalty, grievance, performance, personal authority and the promise of restoration.
Yet he has proved extraordinarily compatible with the religious imagination of parts of the American Right. The convergence is almost anthropological. The televangelist says: You have been betrayed. The world is against you. I understand your grievance. Follow me and we can restore what has been lost. The populist politician says much the same thing, replacing salvation with national restoration.
There is consequently an uneasy resemblance between the culture of the television evangelist and the politics of Trumpism: personality, spectacle, grievance, loyalty, money, performance and the promise of redemption.
The difference, of course, is that the televangelist claims to speak for God while the politician claims to speak for the people. When those two claims begin to reinforce one another, however, politics acquires some of the characteristics of religion. It acquires saints and sinners, martyrs and enemies, rituals and sacred gatherings, heretics and converts, betrayal and redemption.
That phenomenon was visible in the extraordinary response to the murder and memorialisation of the charismatic, popular and divisive conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The point is not whether the grief manifested across the rightwing media-verse was sincere – it plainly was – nor whether the religious language was genuine. It was both. The more interesting observation is that the death of a political activist can be absorbed into a larger narrative of sacrifice, persecution, martyrdom and national renewal.
This is where political movements can begin to acquire a religious emotional architecture.
And it is worth being careful here. Political martyrdom is not uniquely Christian. Communists, fascists, nationalists, revolutionaries and liberation movements have all created martyrs. But Christianity supplies an especially powerful vocabulary of sacrifice, blood, witness, redemption and resurrection. The political temptation is obvious.
The American paradox
And yet all of this muscular Christianity, civilisational renewal and providential rhetoric is unfolding against a remarkable backdrop: America itself is deeply divided about what America is.
It is one of the most diverse societies on earth. It contains multiple religious traditions and enormous numbers of people who are secular or non-religious. Its politics have become intensely polarised. Its cultural conflicts are increasingly existential in tone.
Christian nationalism therefore confronts a paradox of its own making. It seeks to define a pluralistic country through one of its historical traditions. It can say, with considerable historical justification, that Christianity helped shape America. But it cannot simply turn that historical fact into a constitutional proposition that America belongs to Christians.
The American founding contains a deliberate tension here. Religion was important to the cultural environment in which the Republic developed, but the Constitution did not establish a Christian state. The genius – and perhaps the fragility – of the American experiment was that a profoundly religious society attempted to construct a political order in which different religions, and ultimately non-belief, could coexist.
The city upon the hill was never a single-denomination clubhouse.
That makes the contemporary rhetoric of Christian nationalism both understandable and problematic. It is partly a response to a genuine sense of cultural dislocation: secularisation, demographic change, immigration, declining institutional trust, economic insecurity, the collapse of older forms of community and the sense among many people that the country they knew has disappeared.
Grievances require ideology before they become political mobilisation. Christian nationalism can provide that ideology. It offers an explanation of what has gone wrong and a story about how it might be repaired. But the story can become dangerous when “America” and “Christianity” are treated as interchangeable terms. For then criticism of America can begin to sound like criticism of Christianity, and criticism of Christianity can be interpreted as hostility to America.
That is not a recipe for pluralism.
The constitutional counterweight
There is an important American corrective to all this biblical geography and civilisational rhetoric: the Constitution. America may have imagined itself as a chosen people building a city upon a hill, but the republic’s founders did not establish a Christian state. The First Amendment famously prohibited Congress from establishing a religion while protecting the free exercise of religion. That distinction was fundamental. Religion was not to be banished from public life; neither was the state to acquire a church.
This is one of the great American paradoxes. The country was profoundly shaped by Christianity, yet its constitutional architecture deliberately separated religious authority from governmental authority. The separation of church and state was not an act of hostility towards religion. It was, among other things, a recognition that a society of competing faiths could not remain free if the state became the arbiter of religious truth.
The distinction matters today because it separates two propositions that are increasingly liable to be conflated. The first is historical: Christianity profoundly influenced the formation of American institutions, habits and moral assumptions. The second is political: therefore, the American state should embody Christianity. The first is plainly defensible; the second is precisely the proposition against which the constitutional settlement was designed to provide some protection.
There is an irony here that reaches beyond America. The Christian tradition itself contains a long and complicated argument about the proper relationship between spiritual and temporal power. “Render unto Caesar” is not a complete constitutional theory, but it establishes a distinction that has proved remarkably fertile. Christianity may speak to the conscience of the citizen without becoming the official ideology of the state.
And perhaps this is where the larger philosophical movement: the extraordinary evolution of Western thought from an admiration for the mighty to an ethic increasingly concerned with the meek. The ancient world admired strength, glory, conquest and heroic virtue. Achilles is the archetype, particularly for the likes of Hegseth (absent, of course, the arguably homoerotic Patroclus undertone): muscled and magnificent, wrathful, proud and formidable. Christianity did something extraordinarily disruptive to that moral hierarchy. The mighty are sidelined, placing the weak, the poor, the humble and the suffering much closer to the centre of moral concern.
The Sermon on the Mount turned the conventional hierarchy upside down. Blessed are not necessarily the conquerors, the powerful and the triumphant, but the meek, the merciful and the peacemakers. Over centuries that moral inversion seeped, unevenly and imperfectly, into Western law, politics and social thought. It eventually became possible to imagine that the legitimacy of power should be measured not simply by what the powerful can accomplish, but by how they treat those without power.
That is a remarkable development in the history of political civilisation. And it provides an interesting test for contemporary muscular Christianity. The question is not whether Christianity can coexist with strength. Of course it can; Christianity has done so for two millennia. The more searching question is whether the Christian inheritance is being invoked to restrain power or to sanctify it.
That distinction brings us back to the Constitution. The American founders did not solve the problem of religion and power, but they constructed a political system in which neither church nor state was supposed to possess the whole truth. The republic was to remain secular in its institutions precisely so that its citizens could remain religious — or not religious — in their consciences.
The city upon the hill, in other words, was never meant to be a theocracy. It was an experiment in self-government.
And perhaps that is one of the more enduring contributions of the American experiment to the Western story: not the claim that America had discovered the New Jerusalem, but the much more modest proposition that people of different faiths could attempt to build a political community without first agreeing upon God.
What the rest of the world sees
There is also an international dimension that American civilisational rhetoric can easily overlook.
The United States remains the world’s pre-eminent military power, one of its largest economies and the centre of an extraordinary network of alliances and institutions. Its technology, universities, culture, financial system and military reach remain formidable.
But power and credibility are not the same thing. A hegemon can compel without inspiring.
And American power depends upon something more intangible than aircraft carriers and dollars: other countries must believe that American commitments mean something, that alliances are durable, that Washington understands the difference between interest and principle, and that its rhetoric about democracy, freedom and the rules-based order has some relationship to its conduct. That is where the present moment becomes particularly awkward.
When the world’s most powerful democracy speaks in the language of Christian civilisation while its president behaves, to a sceptical foreign observer, like a transactional television personality – opportunistic, self-promoting, bullying and apparently indifferent to ideological consistency – the result can be a peculiar dissonance.
The United States says values. The world watches behaviour. America says leadership. Others see transaction. America invokes faith. Others wonder whether they should still have faith in America.
That word “faith” is not accidental. International relations has its own definition. Alliances depend upon confidence. Treaties depend upon credibility. Soft power depends upon the willingness of others to believe that the power being exercised is legitimate, or at least predictable. But once confidence begins to disappear, it is remarkably difficult to restore.
And this is where the Christian rhetoric can become counterproductive. If America presents itself not simply as a powerful state but as the guardian of Western civilisation and Christian values, it raises the moral expectations by which its conduct will be judged. If it invokes God, the world can ask whether its conduct reflects the qualities attributed to God. If it invokes civilisation, the world can ask whether its conduct is civilised. If it invokes the rules-based order, the world can ask whether the rules apply to Washington as well as to everybody else.
The higher the rhetoric, the greater the distance when behaviour falls short.
An American pontiff in Washington’s shadow
The election of an American pope adds an extraordinary complication.
Pope Leo XIV is, by definition, an American product of the culture, but he does not belong to America in the political sense. The Catholic Church is universal, and the papacy represents an authority that transcends national interest.
His evident reservations about aspects of the Trump administration, particularly its treatment of migrants and its harder-edged nationalism, are therefore significant. The Pope cannot simply be absorbed into the American civilisational project because Catholicism itself contains a competing conception of universality.
That is perhaps one reason the current “Catholic moment” is so interesting. American Catholicism is simultaneously being courted by the nationalist Right and reminded by its own universal tradition that Christianity is larger than the nation. The Pope’s position effectively asks a question that Christian nationalism finds difficult to answer: where does Christian allegiance end and national allegiance begin?
The answer cannot simply be “wherever America says it does” because the Christian faith, at least in its Catholic conception, does not stop at the border. Nor does the stranger cease to be a human being when he crosses it.
The return to faith – and a Mahatma moment
In the intellectual world, therefore, something genuinely important is happening beneath the politics.
A number of intellectually serious people are rediscovering Christianity because they have come to understand that the supposedly secular values of the modern West are not as self-explanatory as they once assumed. They are asking where ideas of human dignity, equality, compassion, sacrifice and moral obligation came from, and whether a civilisation can sustain them once it forgets their genealogy. This is a worthwhile conversation, but there is a danger in turning it into a story of Western vindication.
The West has an extraordinary inheritance. It also has an extraordinary record of failing to live up to it.
This is where an apocryphal quip by Mahatma Gandhi becomes unexpectedly useful. Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Gandhi is supposed to have replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” He almost certainly did not say it. But the joke survives because it captures something profound.
The West has produced ideals of extraordinary moral power. It has also spent much of its history demonstrating how difficult those ideals are to practise. The point is not to discard the inheritance. Quite the opposite. It is to take it seriously enough to judge ourselves by it.
Perhaps the proper response to the rediscovery of Western civilisation is therefore neither triumphalism nor self-loathing, but gratitude without complacency – acknowledging the Christian foundations of much Western moral thought without pretending that Christianity has a monopoly on virtue. We can recognise the achievements of the West without denying the violence that accompanied them. We can defend liberal democracy without pretending that every Western action has been liberal or democratic.
And perhaps the deepest lesson of the Christian inheritance is that being “chosen” is not a certificate of moral superiority. The biblical prophets spent an extraordinary amount of time telling their own people that God’s favour did not exempt them from judgement.
Indeed, the Bible that gave America its language of Exodus, Promised Land and Manifest Destiny also gave it the prophets. And the prophets were not particularly polite to powerful people who believed themselves righteous. They asked who was being excluded, who was being oppressed, how the stranger was being treated, what happened to the poor, the widow and the orphan, and what became of justice when power convinced itself that it was acting in the name of God.
That is why the phrase “What would Jesus do?” has more bite than its sometimes saccharine popular usage suggests. It is not merely a question about personal kindness. Applied seriously to statecraft, war and national power, it becomes an interrogation of the entire project.
What would Jesus make of the stranger at the border? What would he make of the poor? What would he make of vengeance? What would he make of the worship of strength? What would he make of the powerful congratulating themselves on their righteousness? What would he make of the Sermon on the Mount?
And, most awkwardly for the muscular Christian, what would he make of: “Blessed are the peacemakers”?
The great American story may therefore not be that America is the New Jerusalem. It is that America has repeatedly imagined itself becoming one. The city upon the hill was an aspiration before it became a boast. The New Jerusalem is an eschatological promise, not a national certificate. Civilisation is something to be practised, not possessed.
Which brings us back to that wonderfully mischievous Gandhi line. “Western civilisation?” “It would be a good idea.”
Perhaps that is the most useful way of understanding the contemporary return to faith. Christianity may indeed be one of the great sources of the moral vocabulary by which the West understands itself. But the test of a civilisation is not the grandeur of its inheritance. It is what it does with it.
The Bible gave America a map, a mythology and a moral vocabulary. The gun helped conquer the continent. The Constitution tried to establish the rules by which its people might live together. The pulpit supplied the language of providence. The television evangelist transformed faith into spectacle. The politician discovered the mobilising power of grievance, identity and redemption. The soldier discovered that Scripture could be placed beside the missile.
And now the most powerful country on earth is once again asking the world to believe in its exceptional mission. The world, understandably, is watching what it does.
Perhaps that is the ultimate irony of the city upon the hill. The higher the hill, the more visible the conduct of those who live upon it. And if America wants to invoke the Bible as its civilisational inheritance, it inherits not only the stories of Exodus and conquest, but the uncomfortable questions of the prophets.
Or, to put it in the irreverent vernacular of an old, sceptical observer:
What would Jesus do?
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
This essay was written in conversation with books I’ve read, ideas formed and half-formed, and, more recently, in sustained dialogue with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.
In a recent opinion piece in The Australian conservative British historian and US resident Niall Ferguson reflects on the legacy of 9/11 and concludes – after two decades of analysis – that the attacks on 11 September 2001 signaled not merely terrorism but a broader clash of civilisations that the West is now losing. Recalling his own reactions on that momentous day, Ferguson admits that he initially sought secular explanations for the attacks: economic downturns, American imperial overreach, and global political fragmentation. Yet re-examining Osama bin Laden’s statements, he recognises that the al-Qa’ida leader framed his actions as a religious war against “crusaders,” rooted in Islamic grievance over Palestine and Western dominance. Bin Laden’s explicit appeal to faith, not politics, aligns with Samuel Huntington’s much-criticised thesis that post–Cold War conflict would be cultural, with Islam and the West as enduring antagonists.
Although the United States and its allies largely defeated jihadist terrorism within their own borders—terrorism in Iraq has plummeted and attacks in the U.S. remain rare—Ferguson argues that Islamism has advanced through dawa (non-violent proselytising) and political penetration. Organisations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, exploit Western legal and educational institutions while Gulf states like Qatar fund universities and shape intellectual climates. Meanwhile, demographic trends favour Islam: global Muslim populations are rising rapidly and will nearly equal Christians by mid-century, while Western societies grow more secular and internally divided.
Geopolitically, the West faces a resurgent “axis of upheaval”—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—while allies waver. The international solidarity that followed 9/11 contrasts sharply with the fragmented reaction to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, where UN resolutions condemned Israeli actions more than Islamist violence and several states recognised Palestinian statehood. Public opinion, especially among younger generations, has shifted sharply against Israel and, in some cases, towards open antisemitism; bin Laden’s anti-Western rhetoric even circulates approvingly on platforms like TikTok.
Ferguson concedes that bin Laden lost the “war on terror,” but claims he is winning the longer contest Huntington foresaw. Islamism thrives without spectacular violence, demographic momentum favours Muslim societies, and Western civilisation—once confident in its Judeo-Christian identity—is fractured and uncertain. Two decades after 9/11, Ferguson concludes that the clash of civilisations is real, and the West is no longer clearly ahead.
Last week’s azure September skies over New York brought back memories. Twenty-four years ago I was due to give a lecture at New York University. The date of the lecture was September 12. I never flew.
On the day of the attacks, I sat in my study at Jesus College, Oxford, staring incredulously at the pixelated live video of the World Trade Centre twin towers first blazing, then collapsing. Not long after, in April 2002, I accepted a chair at the Stern School of Business at New York University and resigned my Oxford professorship.
My motivation was partly the hereditary Scottish tendency to march towards the sound of gunfire. As a teenager in 1914, my grandfather John Ferguson had volunteered to fight the Germans. This seemed easier.
Regardless of the 9/11 attackers’ motives, I had a strong objection to terrorism as a political method – a result of growing up in Glasgow in the 1970s, when “the Troubles” in nearby Northern Ireland did more than merely resonate.
My first impulse after the attacks, in a piece for The New York Times, was to liken the sympathetic British reaction to 9/11 to the American reaction to the Blitz of 1940-41.
In the rubble, after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower. Doug Kanter / AFP
But I also warned Americans to “steel themselves for a long, inglorious kind of war that governments in Europe already know only too well”. In wars against terrorists, I wrote, “there are no quick victories. The foe does not line up his tanks for you to flatten, his ships for you to sink. His troops live among you.”
Yet this was not the Provisional IRA. Re-reading a transcript of Osama bin Laden’s first post-9/11 video, from November 3, 2001, I am reminded of how explicitly he declared a war of religion. “People were divided into two parts” after 9/11, he declared. “The first part supported these strikes against US tyranny, while the second denounced them.
“The vast majority of the sons of the Islamic world were happy about these strikes,” bin Laden went on, “because they believe that the strikes were in reaction to the huge criminality practised by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries.”
Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
There were demonstrations of support for his action “from the farthest point in the eastern part of the Islamic world to the farthest point in the western part of the Islamic world”. This revealed the key reality: “This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathised with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders.”
With the passage of 2½ decades, it is startling just how unambiguous bin Laden was about his religious motive. “Under no circumstances,” he declared, “should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For the enmity is based on creed … It is a question of faith, not a war against terrorism.” The goal of all Muslims should now be to “resist the most ferocious, serious and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed” to Mohammed.
Bin Laden saw the war he was waging as a counter-attack – “to take revenge for those innocent children in Palestine, Iraq, southern Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir and The Philippines”. The US president, George W. Bush, might be the latest “crusader”, who “carried the cross and raised its banner high”, but bin Laden traced his war back to the aftermath of World War I when “the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner … and Palestine was occupied by the British”. Now the tables had been turned. And he had turned them with just 19 men whose faith exalted martyrdom.
George W Bush and retired firefighter Bob Beckwith, September 14, 2001, AFP
You can see why, at the time, many commentators saw 9/11 as vindicating Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay on The Clash of Civilisations had been published in 1993, as well as Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernise.
My wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was born in Somalia and shared this view, not because she was a scholar of Islam but because she was a Muslim – and, indeed, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In September 2001, she was working at a political think tank in the Netherlands, having sought asylum there in 1992 to escape war-torn Mogadishu and an arranged marriage.
Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In her memoir, Infidel, she recalls how, after hearing bin Laden’s video, she “picked up the (Koran) and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find bin Laden’s quotations in there.” She shot to notoriety by telling the Dutch that the 9/11 attackers were simply following the Prophet Mohammed’s injunction to wage holy war.
Over the past 24 years I have valiantly tried to see 9/11 differently – not as a civilisational clash between Islam and “the West” but as something that fit better into my own secular frame of reference. Raised an atheist, trained as an economic historian, I felt obliged to look behind what I took to be the facade of religious zealotry.
A decade after the attacks, in a piece I wrote for The New York Times Magazine, I portrayed them as the product of four underlying historical trends. First, the spread of terrorism from the Middle East and Europe to the US. Second, the post-2000 economic downturn, combined with widening inequality between nations and a coming oil shock, possibly compounded by a Saudi revolution akin to the one that overthrew the shah in Iran in 1979. (I completely failed to foresee the shale oil revolution and bought into the “peak oil” myth.) Third, the transition of American global power from informal to formal imperialism. And last, the fragmentation of the multicultural polity. (“Rather than anticipating a clash between monolithic civilisations, we should expect a continued process of political disintegration as religious and ethnic conflicts challenge the integrity of existing multicultural nation-states.”)
Missing in this – and in much of my work that followed – was Islam.
In The War of the World (2006), I got a little closer to Huntington, portraying 1979 as a much bigger turning point than 2001 in terms of the demographic as well as political rise of Islam, a point I returned to in Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011). However, laboriously quantifying every war since Huntington’s essay had appeared, I argued that most conflicts since 1993 had, in reality, been within rather than between civilisations. In The Square and the Tower (2017), I applied network theory to the problem, showing how al-Qaeda itself was a network within a much larger network of Islamist organisations; and that its expansion in response to the invasion of Iraq ultimately necessitated a networked response (in the form of General Stan McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command). Most recently, in Doom (2021), I downgraded 9/11 to just another disaster, and not a very big one: “In terms of excess mortality, April 2020 in New York City was … three and a half times worse than September 2001, the month of the 9/11 terrorist attack.”
On reflection, I see that I was overthinking the event. Or perhaps under-thinking it.
Huntington, Lewis and my wife were right.
In Huntington’s original formulation, “the fundamental source of conflict” in the world after the Cold War would be cultural; “the principal conflicts of global politics” would be “between nations and groups of different civilisations” – “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African”. In particular, Huntington predicted, the “centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam” could become “more virulent”. He also foresaw a “Confucian-Islamic military connection” that would culminate in a conflict between “The West and the Rest”.
Among the younger generation of proto-woke Ivy League professors, Huntington was widely mocked for his “essentialism”. But consider, with Huntington’s argument in mind, all that has happened since September 2001.
Terrorism has largely been contained in the US and EU, though not globally. In that sense, we won the “war on terror”, which was successfully displaced from the US to the periphery. It was ultimately defeated in Iraq, though not in Afghanistan. Today, as a result, terrorism in the world looks very different from what I foresaw in 2001. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, the top five countries most impacted by terrorism last year were: Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Syria, Mali and Niger. Globally, terrorism peaked in 2014-15. In countries such as Iraq, it has declined dramatically. (In 2007, terrorists claimed 6249 lives in Iraq. Last year, the total was just 59.)
In the US, it is widely asserted, white supremacists now pose a bigger terrorist threat than Islamists – although the attack in New Orleans on January 1, 2025, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 people by driving a pick-up truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street, is a reminder that Islamic State has not entirely gone away. We now know who murdered Charlie Kirk, and a white supremacist he was not.
Still, the latest Global Terrorism Threat Assessment by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies makes clear just how wrong I was in 2001 to anticipate a sustained campaign of jihadist terrorism in the US. Say what you like about our national security agencies, they won that war.
Yet nonviolent radicalisation (what Islam calls dawa as opposed to violent jihad) has advanced significantly everywhere in the Western world, wherever there are Muslim communities. The critical point – as my wife explained in a book on the subject – is that Islamism as a deeply illiberal political ideology does not need to engage in acts of terrorism to spread.
I never cease to marvel at the ingenuity with which the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytising organisations spread their networks, through mosques, Islamic centres, schools, colleges and local politics. Consider only the effectiveness of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, founded in 1994, which today boasts on its website of having “100+ active lawsuits” and “600,000+ Legislative Action Alerts”, whatever that means. It has almost 30 offices throughout the country.
Most people who encounter CAIR take it to be something like the Anti-Defamation League for Muslims – a civil rights organisation that just happens to be concerned about the rights of Muslims. But it is not that at all.
Ten countries have recognized the non-existent Palestinian state since October 7, including three European Union EU member states, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain. Canada, France, Australia and the United Kingdom Britain are itching to join them. Picture: AFP
Rather, it is more like a front organisation for the Muslim Brotherhood of America. In a recent article, Ayaan has brilliantly described the many ingenious ways that CAIR exploits the institutions of our open society, most recently settling a lawsuit to avoid revealing its sources of funding.
Good luck following the money. In her words: “The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) controls mosque properties and financial assets. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) lends the Brotherhood a degree of religious legitimacy. The American Muslim Council (AMC) works the political front, cutting deals and building alliances. The Muslim American Society (MAS) runs operations on the ground, embedding itself firmly in local communities. In universities, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) shapes the narrative. On campuses, the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) targets the next wave of recruits. The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Young Muslims (YM) focus on families and youth.”
Even the United Arab Emirates has proscribed CAIR as a terrorist organisation. Yet dozens of Democratic legislators are on the record on the CAIR website, praising its work as they doubtless also praise the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A complementary effort is the way Qatar – the largest source of foreign donations to US universities since reporting began in 1986 – funnels money into academia. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, as reported in The Free Press, nearly a third of Qatari donations to American colleges – more than $US2bn – were given between 2021 and 2024. As Mitchell G. Bard shows in Arab Funding of American Universities (2025), this money is one of the reasons college campuses have become such hotbeds of anti-Semitism in recent years.
It is not just that the West has been successfully penetrated by an antagonistic civilisation that fundamentally rejects the fundamental division between religion and politics – church and state – that lies at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism. The West is also being geopolitically outmanoeuvred by “the rest” in just the way Huntington foresaw.
Late Hamas leaders Ismail Haniya and Yahya Sinwar during a rally marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of Hamas in 2017. AFP
Contrast the global order after 9/11 with the global order today. We have come a long way since NATO secretary-general George Robertson’s statement on September 11, 2001: “Our message to the people of the United States is … ‘We are with you’.”
In the past three years, Zbig Brzezinski’s worst-case scenario has come about. “Potentially, the most dangerous scenario,” he wrote in The Grand Chessboard (1997), “would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances”.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that grand coalition has come into being, with North Korea as a fourth member. The “axis of upheaval” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) is now co-operating in military, economic and diplomatic ways.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s combative treatment of US allies (the EU, Japan, South Korea) and neutrals (Brazil, India and Switzerland), not least with respect to trade policy, is alienating not only the traditionally non-aligned but also key partners.
The upshot is that Israel is now virtually alone in fighting against the Islamists, so that even the US wants plausible deniability when, as earlier this month, the Israeli Air Force strikes the leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital, Doha.
The point is that the clash of civilisation continues. Now ask yourself: Who’s winning?
The Hamas attack on Israel two years ago was essentially an Israeli 9/11 (worse in relative terms). But compare the global reactions.
UN Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted unanimously on September 28, 2001, called on all member states to freeze terrorist financing, pass anti-terrorism laws, prevent suspected terrorists from travelling across international borders, and screen asylum-seekers for possible terrorist ties. This was an unprecedented show of international unity.
By contrast, no Security Council resolution could be passed in the wake of October 7. UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/21 – which called for an “immediate” and “sustained” humanitarian truce and “cessation of hostilities” in Gaza and condemned “all acts of violence aimed at Palestinian and Israeli civilians” – was introduced by Jordan on behalf of a group of Arab states. When it was adopted on October 27, 2023, 121 voted in favour, 44 abstained, 14 absented themselves and only 14 (including Israel and the US) voted against.
Video grab from footage released by the Israeli Hostage and Missing Families Forum campaign shows what the group described as Israeli female soldiers being captured by Hamas on 10/7
Ten countries have recognised the non-existent Palestinian state since October 7, including three EU member states, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain. Canada, France, Australia and Britain are itching to join them.
In short, comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian “global intifada” is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism).
Demographically, Islam is certainly winning. According to Pew Research (June 2025), “The number of Muslims around the world grew 21 per cent between 2010 and 2020, from 1.7 billion to 2.0 billion.” That was twice as fast as the rest of the world’s population, increasing the Muslim share from 24 per cent to 26 per cent. Earlier research by Pew (from 2015) forecast that “if current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world”. In Europe, Pew estimated, Muslims would make up 10 per cent of the overall population, up from 5.9 per cent in 2010. In the US, Muslims would outnumber Jews. This does not seem implausible.
Already in Britain, Muhammad has overtaken Noah as the top name for baby boys in England and Wales, having been in the top 10 since 2016.
At the same time, Western civilisation today is so much more divided than it was 24 years ago. The public response to October 7 illuminated the divisions. Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen Z, September 11 is a faint memory – as distant as the Cuban missile crisis and John F. Kennedy’s assassination were to my generation. But it’s also because the Islamists have done such a good job of co-opting the campus radicals, somehow overriding the cognitive dissonance in slogans such as “Queers for Palestine”, while tapping the anti-Semitism that still lurks on the far right.
According to Brookings, “young Republicans aged 18-49 have shifted from 35 per cent having an unfavourable view of Israel to 50 per cent unfavourable … Among Democrats, there has been an increase of 62 per cent to 71 per cent (with an unfavourable view of Israel) in the 18 to 49-year-old demographic … Only 9 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.”
Supporters of Yemen’s Houthi’s with pictures of Hamas’ slain leader Yahya Sinwar2024: AFP
A recent poll in Britain by Campaign Against Anti-Semitism revealed a striking shift in attitudes towards Jews. Once again, the swing towards anti-Semitism is more pronounced among the young: “Forty-five per cent of the British public … believes that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews … 60 per cent of young people believe this.
“Forty-nine per cent of 18-24-year-olds are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.
“Only 31 per cent of young voters agree that Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.
“Twenty-six per cent of the British public believes that Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.
“Nineteen per cent of young people believe that the Hamas attack on Israel was justified.”
Such attitudes can be found in Britain on both the political left and the political right. A third of Labour voters say they are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel, as do 54 per cent of Green Party voters, 15 per cent of whom believe Hamas’s attack on Israel was justified. But almost one in four supporters of the rapidly growing Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, believe Jewish people “chase money more than other people do”.
During the Cold War, the West was often referred to as a “Judaeo-Christian” civilisation. That term is starting to seem like an anachronism. Two years ago, another bin Laden pronouncement – his Letter to America, originally published on the first anniversary of September 11 – enjoyed a sudden resurgence of interest, not least because its attacks on the power of American Jews seemed to strike a chord with young users of TikTok.
Palestinians celebrate their return after crossing the border fence with Israel on 10/7. AFP
One popular video showed a young woman brushing her hair with the caption, “When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America and you realise you’ve been lied to your whole entire life.” At one point in November 2023, a TikTok search for #lettertoamerica found videos with 14.2 million views. In total, about 300 videos were posted under that hashtag.
Walking the streets of New York last week, I felt old. To my children, my students and my employees, September 11 is not a memory. It is not even a historical fact. It is something people argue about on social media.
As I write, Tucker Carlson has just told Piers Morgan that an “FBI document” indicated “an Israeli spy ring in the United States … knew 9/11 was coming”. The reality is, of course, that only the conspirators themselves knew that. They also knew, very clearly, why they were going to do it.
It has taken me all these years to understand that 9/11 really was a clash of civilisations. And it has taken me until now finally to face the reality that ours is losing.
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. This essay originally was published in The Free Press
Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my favourite poets. In 1969, a Christian friend gave me a Penguin Modern Poets edition of his poems. Here are three sublime spiritual pieces from this treasured book, beautifully translated by JB Leishman. No other translations are as lovely as his.
I would always recall these poems when visiting the Holy Land, and since my very first visit in 1971, I have associated them particularly with the Old City of Jerusalem. I took the photographs accompanying this piece in that exquisite place.
The Olive Garden
And still he climbed, and through the grey leaves thrust,
quite grey and lost in the grey olive lands,
and laid his burning forehead full of dust
deep in the dustiness of burning hands.
After all, this.
And this, this, then was the end
Now I’m to go, while I am going blind,
and, oh, why wilt Thou now have me still contend
Thou art, whom I myself no longer find.
No more I find thee. In myself no tone
of Thee; nor in the rest; nor in this stone.
I can find Thee no more. I am alone.
I am alone with all that human fate
I undertook through Thee to mitigate,
Thou who art not. Oh, shame too consummate…
An angel came, those afterwards relate.
Wherefore an angel? Oh, there came the night,
and turned the leaves trees indifferently,
and the disciples stirred uneasily.
Wherefore an angel? Oh, there came the night.
The night that came requires no specifying;
just so a hundred nights and nights go by,
while dogs are sleeping and while stones are lying –
just any melancholy night that, sighing,
lingers till morning mount the sky.
For Angels never never come to such men’s prayers
nor nights for them mix glory with their gloom,
Forsakenness is the self-loser’s doom
and such are absent from their fathers cares
and disincluded from their mothers womb.
The Spectator
I watched the storms in the tree above:
after days of mild decaying
my windows shrink from there assaying,
and the things I hear the distant saying,
without a friend I find dismaying,
without a sister I cannot love.
There goes the storm to urge and alter,
through forest trees and through time’s tree;
and nothing seems to age or falter:
the landscape like an open psalter,
speaks gravely of eternity.
How small the strife that’s occupied us,
how great is all that strives within us!
We might, if, like the things inside us,
we let the great storm over-ride us grow
spacious and anonymous.
We conquer littleness, obtaining
success that only makes a small,
while unconstrained and unconstraining,
The permanent alludes us all:
that angel who, through loath, yet lingers
to wrestle with mortality,
and, when opponents’ sinews settle
in strife and stretch themselves to metal,
can feel it move beneath his fingers
like strings in some deep melody.
The challenger who failed to stand
that trial so constantly rejected
goes forth upright and resurrected
and great from that hard, forming hand
that clasped about him and completed.
Conquests no longer fascinate.
His growth consists in being defeated
by something ever-grandlier great.
The Annunciation
(Words of the Angel)
You are not nearer God then we;
he’s far from everyone .
And yet, your hands most wonderfully
Reveal his benison.
From woman’s sleeve none ever grew
so ripe, so shimmeringly:
I am the day, I am the dew,
you, Lady, are the tree.
Pardon, now my long journey’s done,
I had forgot to say
what he who sat as in the sun,
grand in his gold array ,
told me to tell you, pensive one
(space has bewildered me)
I am the start of what’s begun,
you, Lady, are the tree.
I spread my wings and wide and rose,
the space around grew less;
your little house quite overflows
with my abundant dress.
But still you keep your solitude
And hardly notice me:
I’m but a breeze within the wood,
you, Lady, are the tree.
The angels tremble in their choir,
grow pale, and separate:
never were longing and desire
so vague and yet, so great.
Something perhaps is going to be
that you perceived in dream.
Hail to you! for my soul can see
that you are ripe and teem.
You lofty gate, that any day
may open for our good:
Your ear my longing songs assay
My word – I know now – lost its way
in you as in a wood.
And thus your last dream was designed
to be fulfilled by me.
God looked at me: he made me blind…
You, Lady, are the tree.
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief.
الشاعر الألماني راينر ماريا ريلكه هو أحد المفضلين لدي .. هذان اثنان من أعماله الروحية السامية ، تمت ترجمتها بشكل جميل من قبل ج ب ليشمان في أول إصدار لي من سلسلة بنجوين الشعراء المعاصري. لا توجد ترجمات أخرى جميلة مثل ترجماته.
حديقة الزيتون
وما زال يتسلق ، ومن خلال الأوراق الرمادية ،
رمادية تمامًا وفقدت في أراضي الزيتون الرمادية ،
ووضع جبهته المشتعلة مملوءة بالتراب
في أعماق غبار الأيدي المحترقة.
بعد كل هذا.
وهذه كانت النهاية
الآن سأذهب ، بينما أنا أعمى ،
و ، أوه ، لماذا تريد الآن أن أجادلني
أنت الذي لم أعد أجده بنفسي.
لا أجدك بعد الآن. في نفسي لا لهجة
منك. ولا في البقية. ولا في هذا الحجر.
لا يمكنني العثور عليك أكثر. انا وحيد.
أنا وحدي مع كل هذا المصير البشري
لقد تعهدت من خلالك بالتخفيف ،
أنت الذي ليس كذلك. أوه ، العار بارع جدا …
جاء ملاك ، فيما بعد.
لماذا ملاك؟ أوه ، جاء الليل ،
وقلبت أوراق الأشجار بلا مبالاة ،
وكان التلاميذ يتقلبون بقلق.
لماذا ملاك؟ أوه ، جاء الليل.
الليلة التي جاءت لا تحتاج إلى تحديد ؛
فقط حتى تمر مائة ليلة وليلة ،
بينما الكلاب نائمة وحجارة الكذب –
فقط أي ليلة حزينة ، تنهد ،
باقية حتى الصباح جبل السماء.
لأن الملائكة لا يأتون أبدًا إلى صلاة مثل هؤلاء الرجال
ولا تخلط الليالي لهم المجد بكآبتهم ،
التهور هو عذاب الخاسر
ومثل هؤلاء غائبون عن اهتمامات آبائهم
واستثنوا من رحم أمهاتهم.
المشاهد
شاهدت العواصف في الشجرة أعلاه:
بعد أيام من التحلل الخفيف
تتقلص نوافذي من هناك ،
والأشياء التي أسمعها تقول من بعيد ،
بدون صديق أجده مخيفًا ،
بدون أخت لا أستطيع أن أحب.
هناك تذهب العاصفة للحث والتغيير ،
من خلال أشجار الغابات وعبر شجرة الزمن ؛
ولا شيء يبدو أنه يتقدم في العمر أو يتعثر:
المناظر الطبيعية مثل سفر المزامير المفتوح ،
يتحدث بجدية عن الخلود.
كم هو صغير الفتن الذي شغلنا ،
ما أعظم كل ما يجتهد فينا!
قد نحب الأشياء التي بداخلنا ،
تركنا العاصفة العظيمة تطوف بنا تنمو
فسيحة ومجهولة.
نحن نتغلب على الصغر ، ونكتسب
النجاح الذي يصنع فقط القليل ،
بينما غير مقيد وغير مقيد ،
الدائم يلمح لنا جميعًا:
ذلك الملاك الذي ، من خلال الكراهية ، باقٍ
تتصارع مع الموت ،
وعندما تستقر أعصاب الخصوم
في الفتنة وتمتد إلى المعدن ،
يمكن أن يشعر أنه يتحرك تحت أصابعه
مثل الأوتار في بعض اللحن العميق.
المتحدي الذي فشل في الوقوف
تلك المحاكمة حتى رفضت باستمرار
يذهب منتصبا ويقوم
وعظيم من تلك اليد الصلبة المشكّلة
التي تشبثت عنه وانتهت.
الفتوحات لم تعد ساحرة.
نموه يتمثل في الهزيمة
بشيء أعظم من أي وقت مضى.
البشارة
(كلمات الملاك)
لستم قريبين من الله منا نحن.
إنه بعيد عن الجميع.
ومع ذلك ، يديك بشكل رائع
تكشف له بنيسون.
من كم المرأة لم ينمو أي شيء
ناضجة جدًا ، ومتألقة جدًا:
انا اليوم انا الندى
أنتِ يا سيدتي الشجرة.
عفوا ، الآن انتهت رحلتي الطويلة ،
لقد نسيت أن أقول
ما هو الذي جلس في الشمس ،
كبير في مجموعته الذهبية ،
أخبرني أن أخبرك ، متأملًا
(الفضاء حيرني)
أنا بداية ما بدأ ،
أنتِ يا سيدتي الشجرة.
بددت أجنحتي واسعة وردية ،
نمت المساحة المحيطة أقل ؛
بيتك الصغير يفيض تمامًا
مع ثوبي الوفير.
لكن ما زلت تحافظ على وحدتك
وبالكاد تلاحظني:
أنا مجرد نسيم داخل الغابة ،
أنتِ يا سيدتي الشجرة.
ترتجف الملائكة في كورالهم ،
تصبح شاحبة ومنفصلة:
لم يكن هناك شوق ورغبة
غامضة جدًا لكنها رائعة جدًا.
ربما شيء ما سيكون
التي تراها في الحلم.
تحية لك! لروحي تستطيع أن ترى
أنك ناضج ومزدحم.
أنت بوابة عالية ، في أي يوم
قد تفتح لمصلحتنا:
أذنك مقايسة أغاني الحنين
كلمتي – أعرف الآن – ضلت طريقها
فيك كما في الخشب.
وهكذا تم تصميم حلمك الأخير
ليحققها لي.
نظر إليّ الله: جعلني أعمى …
أنتِ يا سيدة الشجرة.
Please allow me to introduce myself I’m a man of wealth and taste I’ve been around for a long, long year Stole many a man’s soul and faith
The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Strange things happen If you stay The devil will catch you anyway He’ll seek you here he’ll seek you there The devil will seek you everywhere.
Gun. Race with the Devil (1968)
My words appear to leave you cold; Poor babes, I will not be your scolder: Reflect, the Devil, he is old, To understand him, best grow older.
Goethe, Faust
Say what you like about The Devil, he does at least give a fair price for souls. Faust got twenty four years of worldly knowledge and pleasure in exchange for his (more about him later). When Robert Johnson met him at the crossroads, he mastered the blues overnight. When it comes to music, he’s a hot fiddler – though when he came down to Georgia “lookin’ for a soul to steal”, young Johnny whupped him good. Leonard Cohen reversed this analogy when in one of his last songs, he sang “now the angel’s got a fiddle and the devil’s got a harp”. So, a warning to all: “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me” and thee.
It is said the Devil “gets all the best songs”. He also gets a good few stories, in the form of “biographies” both scholarly and light-hearted and novels and movies that range from allegory to fantasy, depicting him the personification of evil or as a clever and entertaining trickster. In some, he is the ageless hornèdone, and in others, he is just plain horny – I’m thinking here of Jack Nicholson’s scene-stealing performance in the 1987 adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, all wicked grins, lecherous asides and comedic menace. That’s actually one of the better films in a catalogue of cinematic corn that features Satan, to use another of his many names, in person, through a proxy or in psychic proximity to an endangered mortal soul.
Closer to home, my friend and budding author John Rosley, published a novella called A Touch of Sulphur before he passed on in 2022. Its narrator, an incarnated Satan, boasts about his achievements on earth. He has strong and politically incorrect views, particularly regarding the Catholic Church and its clergy whom he regards as his bitterest enemies, ripe for degradation in ways only a devil may invent. I hope that his story, available on Kindle via Amazon, didn’t cause him too many problems when he arrived at Saint Peter’s Gate and knocked on Heaven’s Door.
In the interest of balance, I must note that there been plenty of books written about the old fellow’s nemesis and arch-adversary – including those claimed to have been written by or on behalf of himself. The Almighty, Our Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Big Hughie, and more. There are, as Muslims rightly aver, a thousand names for God. Many contemporary scholars have penned biographies, and so has another friend of mine. This I actually proof-read, but it remains to this day unpublished.
The following, however, is a contemplation of Lucifer, biblical bête noir and literary anti-hero (he, like God goes by a multitude of soubriquets; but I like Lucifer best). It leans more to light-hearted than to outer darkness and neither scholarly nor theological, it is slightly iconoclastic, and, I hope, informative and entertaining. It describes my long and enduring artistic relationship with the “great tempter”, a literary fancy rather than some kind of weird bond with the evil one – neither amoral, immoral nor menacing, but more like a muse.
And …
It all began with Christopher Marlowe
Dr Faustus. Was not that Lucifer an angel once? Mephistopheles. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly loved of God. Faust. How comes it then that he is Prince of Devils? Meph. O, by aspiring pride and insolence, For which God threw him from the face of heaven. Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer? Meph. Unhappy spirits that live with Lucifer, Conspired against our God with Lucifer, And are for ever damned with Lucifer. Faust. Where are you damned? Meph. In hell. Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell? Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I that saw the face of God And tasted the eternal joys of heaven Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being deprived of everlasting bliss? O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of D. Faustus
That was Kit Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who gave us the story of Doctor Faust, the ambitious alchemist who “sold his soul to the Devil” – a salty tale taken up centuries later by German poet Friedrich Goethe and French composer Charles Gounod. His play is best known for his description of the legendary Helen of Troy as “the face that launched a thousand ships”: Marlowe may not have been the first to give us Faust, and nor was he to be the last. German polymath and write Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe took him in the early nineteenth century as did French composer Charles Gounod in 1859: a wonderful opera with a fabulous “soldiers’ chorus”. German author Thomas Mann published Doctor Faustus in 1947 wherein a gifted composer strikes a “Faustian bargain” for creative genius. These tales always end badly, their protagonists forgetting the maxim that those who sup with the devil should use a long spoon.
As for Marlowe, this sixteenth century “rake and rambling boy”, alleged bisexual and also government secret agent, was also an accomplished playwright, recognized as one of the most accomplished in a crowded Elizabethan field, and a master of blank verse – it’s still called “Marlowe’s mighty line”. In the perennial debate about whether or the Bard of Avon wrote the plays attributed to him, Marlowe’s name pops up as one of the prime candidates. A bit of a cruiser, a bit of a bruiser, he died in a tavern brawl in Deptford, southeast London.
It was through Marlowe that I first made a literary acquaintance with Lucifer – back in Moseley Grammar School in the mid-sixties when Kit got himself on to our A Level syllabus, and though one of our set plays was Edward II, the sad tale of a conflicted and controversial king, we were encouraged to read some of his plays. And I’ve always remembered the following exquisite demonstration of his “mighty line” as the medieval Mongol conqueror Amir Tamburlane grieves for his dying wife:
Black is the beauty of the brightest day; The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire, That danc’d with glory on the silver waves, Now wants the fuel that inflam’d his beams; And all with faintness, and for foul disgrace, He binds his temples with a frowning cloud, Ready to darken earth with endless night.
Zenocrate, that gave him light and life, Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory brows, And temper’d every soul with lively heat, Now by the malice of the angry skies, Whose jealousy admits no second mate, Draws in the comfort of her latest breath, All dazzled with the hellish mists of death. Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven, As sentinels to warn th’ immortal souls To entertain divine Zenocrate …
The crystal springs, whose taste illuminates Refined eyes with an eternal sight, Like tried silver run through Paradise To entertain divine Zenocrate:
The cherubins and holy seraphins, That sing and play before the King of Kings, Use all their voices and their instruments To entertain divine Zenocrate;
And, in this sweet and curious harmony, The god that tunes this music to our souls Holds out his hand in highest majesty To entertain divine Zenocrate.
Then let some holy trance convey my thoughts Up to the palace of th’ empyreal heaven, That this my life may be as short to me As are the days of sweet Zenocrate.
But back to Lucifer …
Lucifer and me
I heard the snake was baffled by his sin He shed his scales to find the snake within But born again is born without a skin The poison enters into everything
Leonard Cohen, Treaty
As a nipper, I was well aware of his bad reputation. Brought up Irish catholic in Birmingham, there was no way that I could’ve missed him – it was always a “him” back then and never “her”, though our childhood was replete with biblical archetypes of amorally lapsed ladies with exotic names like Salome, Delilah, and Jezebel who often had songs, plays or movies written about them. Often, they too were portrayed as “the devil incarnate”. Elvis Presley sang about The devil in Disguise. Cliff Richard whinged about his Devil Woman. Fifties crooner Frankie Laine of High Noon and Rawhide fame sang about his unfaithful girlfriend: “if ever a devil was born without a pair of horns, it was you, Jezebel, it was you!”
That business in the Garden of Eden assured us that it was a woman who had committed the “original sin” and that all women were per se “the root of all evil”. This was when Satan earned his reputation as a tempter (nice apple), deceiver (Adam needn’t know) and liar (God won’t mind), and with it, the tag “Prince of Lies”. The implication was, that, if you fucked up, like evangelist preachers today who are caught with their pants down, “the devil made me do it”.
We were taught that Old Nick, as he was called, was forever lying in wait to divert us from the straight and narrow, and that the holier you were, indefinable though that was, the greater the effort he put into suborning you and the greater the rejoicing in the infernal realms should you stumble and fall. He isn’t alone, mind; look at the vicarious pleasure we take in seeing the high and mighty brought low by human failings, particularly politicians and clerics who lecture us on old values like family, neighbourliness, decency, courtesy, and self-control. The internet preys upon everything vile in the human spirit and can corrupt what is good into that vileness, which would certainly be the work of Satan.
A comment in the e-zine Unherd recently described this well: “… what is evil within humanity is only there because of Satan in the first place, having been the one who tempted Adam and Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that placed within us the seeds of his own evil and the root of our corruption. The knowledge of Evil is what spurs us to such negative and destructive impulses, but the knowledge of Good would pull us towards something higher. This of course would be abhorrent to the Dark Prince, thus necessitating the construction of such and infernal mechanism as this to further debase and erode God’s creation, to ‘finish the job’ as it were.”
By coincidence, I was only just listening to The Rest is History podcast about Martin Luther, and Dom and Tom recounted how the Reformation’s progenitor believed the evil one to be intensely real, a clear and present danger. Rantings about Satan were virulent and often quite alimentary, featuring lots of bodily fluids. There is an apocryphal story of how one time, assailed by Satan, Luther threw an inkwell at him. another time, when during an hallucinatory episode, Lucifer appeared to him as a little dog, though an avowed dog-lover, Martin flung unlucky Rover out of the window. A sad case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But I’d never encountered him represented as an actual person. Until I met Christopher Marlowe in Lower Sixth. Along with Kit, I also met Mephistopheles, a demonic go-between tasked by Lucifer to purchase the soul of the ambitious Dr Faustus. Admittedly, M was merely the middleman, but he gave his crew a bad name and literary fame.
About the same time, I happened to bump into him at the amazing Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery – the magnificent statue of Lucifer that stood imperiously in the centre of the central hall. The winged bronze oversized figure (11 feet tall, weighing in at 2,000kg) is Jacob Epstein’s depiction of the Archangel Lucifer, inspired by the renowned sculptor’s fascination with John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). It has stood at the heart of the museum, tall, stern and perhaps androgynous, a custodian of the gallery’s collection, an affirmation of the artist’s genius, and its value to the museum.
And so it was that at Moseley Grammar we learned through the unfortunate Faustus that Lucifer was an actual person, and an untrustworthy one at that. A fellow student, whom I did not know too well, and who was in fact one of the few Jewish students, wrote a poem for our school magazine (of which I was one of the editors). I remember but the last stanza (and later in life, used it as the last verse of a song).
But my literary liaison with Lucifer did not end there. Flatting in London in the early seventies, a friend introduced be to Lucifer’s Cage, a fiery instrumental by English guitarist Gordon Giltrap (who, incidentally, grew up in Deptford, the place of Kit Marlowe’s demise). The tune and its title, and that one verse slept in my imagination for decades, until they crystallized in a song.
Lucifer, star of the morning Lucifer, prince of the night Lucifer falling through darkness Lucifer cast from the light.
Lucifer sits in his wasteland Trapped in the cage of his pride The sirens of importunate circumstance Reclining in ranks by his side Plots he has made, so ingenuous. Dangerous follies and schemes For he has stage-managed quite strenuous Drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.
Lucifer frets in the wasteland Locked in a pillar of ice We know of this only to well We have visited him there once or twice For his is the language of liars And his is the honour of thieves And he is the master of eloquence As the last of the honest men leaves.
Lucifer crawls from the wasteland No solace or peace or rest. For he has corrupted the wisest And he has co-opted the best. And all that is good has since vanished And with it, the fair and the true And the silences hurting his demon heart Are haunting, haunting you.
And the road that winds out of Meggido Is the path that leads to the pit For Lucifer prizes a web of disguises He merely selects one to fit. And the road that runs down to Jericho Is the path that leads him to you And the paradox searing his demon soul Is hunting, hunting you.
So make you no truce with Lucifer Lucifer of fiery breath For Lucifer is treachery And treachery is death.
Lucifer, star of the morning Lucifer, prince of the night Lucifer falling through darkness Lucifer cast from the light.
The “pillar of ice”, by the way, is borrowed from the fourteenth century Italian poet Dante Alighiari’s Inferno. In his account of life after death, the ninth and last of the concentric spheres of hell, is where betrayers and traitors languish. It is presided over by the man himself, the greatest betrayer of all, though now impotent, encased up to chest in ice, a giant, bat-winged demon with with one head and three faces. Each weeps as it chews on a notorious sinner: Jesus’ betrayer Judas Iscariot, and Julius Caesar’s backstabbers Brutus and Cassius. His wing-beats raise a chill wind that continues to freeze the ice surrounding himself and the other sinners in the Ninth Circle, a wind that is felt throughout the other circles of Hell. In contrast to depictions of the devil in Dante’s day as a cunning foe ever ready to prey on human weakness, his Lucifer is strikingly modern, a metaphor for nothingness. Dribbling and speechless, he is all hat and no horse, or more apposite, all horns and no hellfire.
The Emperor of the kingdom dolorous From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice … Consider now how great must be that whole, Which unto such a part conforms itself. Were he as fair once, as he now is foul.
Doré’s Dante – Satan in Hell
Jacob Epstein’s Lucifer
Fallen Angels
So who exactly was this Lucifer, the biblical sum of all our fears?
Many Christians, whom I do not profess to be (I gave up practicing when I was good enough), believe that Satan, or “the devil” as he is commonly known, was once upon an eon ago a gorgeous angel much loved by God and named Lucifer – which means “star (or ‘son’) of the morning” – on account of his exemplary luminescence. No wonder early marketing folk got the idea of naming a brand of matches “Lucifers” – a tag memorialized in the First World War song It’s a long way to Tipperary and the soldiers’ trench superstition from the Crimean War to World War II of “Three on a match”.
He’d got tickets on himself, defied the boss and fell from grace. “Cast out into the Outer Darkness”, in fact. Hence French illustrator Gustave Doré’s striking image of him descending to Earth to fracture a cozy de facto relationship between Adam and Eve, the first human beings, a perfect pair “created in God’s image”, and thereafter to inflict mayhem upon mankind, including, as we have noted above, the concept of “original sin” which broadly defined all humanity as damned until it accepted the dominion of an almighty creator and condemned womankind to an eternity of subjugation to the patriarchy.
This assumption that he is a fallen angel is, scripturally, based the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament of The Bible: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations” (14:12).
But the tabloid story that has been handed down to us through the ages arguably originated in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, written sometime between 300-100 BCE and quite popular around the time of Jesus. It was widely circulated although it was considered a heretical text by the religious authorities on account of its opposition to mainstream Rabbinical Judaism. Whilst referenced a few times in the New Testament, it was rejected by the ecclesiastical canon, (though not, apparently, in Ethiopia – to this day, a unique African outlier to Christianity, and indeed, Judaism). But it’s from Enoch that we’ve inherited most of our mythology of the fallen angels, and also, a lot of apocalyptic imagery and millenarian or “end times” belief.
The apocalyptic Book of Enoch gave names to the Sons of God – Lucifer and his comrades, and also, a mob called the Nephilim. The eponymous Enoch understood them to be fallen angels who, having fallen to Earth, had sex with human women – beautifully portrayed in Daniel Chester French’s sculpture, which has been described as the sexiest statue in Washington DC. God, naturally, punished them, and, their behaviour, it is said, in Noah’s flood. So, it would seem, the fall of the angels related more to sexual sin than to Lucifer’s pride.
The Sons of God Saw the Daughters of Men That They Were Fair.
An artist made a sculpture of Lucifer that was too hot for the church so it commissioned his brother. He made an even hotter one!
Regarding the above picture, a Facebook comment read: “The depiction of Lucifer on the right looks exactly like the one in my dream. I dreamt that I was in very dark hallway or corridor and suddenly the room lit up, not a very divine bright light but more like a very dim light, lit enough to see what was going on. There was this huge very tall, partially robed angel in crimson red. He raised his hands in the air, and when he did, blood exploded out of the walls. It scared the shit out of me. I jumped up out of bed and didn’t go back sleep until the next day. Satan is definitely real, and he isn’t a red goat with horns – he’s a very tall, nice-looking angel with wavy blonde hair – and very very powerful he has wavy blonde hair sort of like Logan Paul’s (an American social media influencer, professional wrestler, YouTuber, entrepreneur, and actor). Though this may sound silly or fun, I’m not joking. I’ve I seen this m…..f…..r in my dream! It was Lucifer!”
And with regard to artistic depictions, there is the amazing sculpture The Fall of the Rebel Angels” created by sculptor Agostino Fasolato in the eighteenth-century. Almost two meters high and carved from a single block of Carrara marble, it is a pyramid of sixty contorted figures. At the top, wielding his sword of fire, is the archangel Michael who, according to religious tradition, led to forces of light in the tumultuous battle that saw Lucifer and his rebel angels consigned to hell. It an extraordinary intertwining of bodies, depicting the falling angels at the moment of their transformation into demons. So, there they are, agonised faces, hornèd heads, and serpents’ tails, rocking and rolling, tossing and turning, tumbling down, down, down into the infernal pit.
Paradise lost
The story of the fall of Lucifer is actually underpinned by not one but two works of fiction: Enoch’s, and the English puritan poet and pamphleteer John Milton’s imaginative and lyrical masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667) which has dominated our perspective of the story ever since.
Milton gave us the first lyrically and psychologically compelling portrait of Lucifer. He was not the sly predator of myth and menace but rather, (initially, at least) an edgy seductive hero. With his fine words, theatricality and swagger, the only ostensible sign of evil within, a lightning scar on his face: “He above the rest, in shape and gesture proudly eminent, stood like a tow’r”. And yet, he winds up as a washed out up idealist and revanchist cynic, “dismay mixt with obdurate pride and steadfast hate”.
Although I was familiar with Paradise Lost, I did not read Milton’s prose opus until the late seventies, encouraged by the the work of nineteenth century French lithographer Gustave Doré who rendered the poet’s words into pictorial flesh. That’s his iconic image of Lucifer descending to Earth at the head of this story.
Sometime in the early eighties, 83 or 84 I think, my old pal and provocateur Yuri the Storyteller introduced me to Lilith.
Lilith has been around for thousands of years. In the Talmud, she is described as a winged demoness with a human appearance. She appears in the bible, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in Hebrew folklore, and has been mentioned in black magic treatises. The apocryphal story is that Lilith was Adam’s first wife. God made Adam from dirt and clay. Adam bored, requested a companion, and God obliged with Lilith. Legend has it that her dirt was dirtier than Adam’s, but put that down to patriarchal prejudice and propaganda. More likely, she had the dirt on him! But I digress. Apparently, Lilith was not as inferior to Adam as he wanted. She wanted to be her own person, not Adam’s wife-slave. The story is that when Adam insisted on the missionary position, Lilith refused, saying “Why must I lie beneath you? We are both equal. We come from the same earth”. Adam got mad, and Lilith took off.
Because of this, she was banished from Eden and became a spirit associated with the seductive side of a woman. Eve came in her place to stand behind Adam, not beside him. Lilith became the timeless femme fatale, preying on the easily tempted weaker sex, the fabled incubus who comes at night upon men as they sleep. It is not for nothing that she has been hailed the (informal) goddess of wet dreams.
The legends are many and various. If you buy into the Lilith theory, you will see her cropping up throughout history in a variety of guises. In biblical times: Delilah, Salome, and Potophar’s wife. In fact and fable: Sheherazade, Lucrezia Borgia, Mata Hari, Evita Peron. Hollywood’s screen ‘sirens’ like Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. All of them antitheses to secular saints like Eve, Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Jackie Onassis, Mother Theresa, and Princess Diana.
Lilith’s story deserved an epic poem, so borrowing from Milton and the opening chapter of JRR Tolkien’s Silmarillion, I duly wrote Lilith – a poem of the fall. It was attributed to a Roman poet celebrated during the reigns of emperors Claudius and Nero. It’s forward read:
“The style of Lilith differs markedly from that of other poems attributed to Meniscus – most notably the Hebrew Heroes cycle and was evidently written for a different manner of presentation. It was most likely written to be recited rather than sang (as were his other “story songs”). Recitations were a common form of entertainment in the middle Roman period, owing their popularity to the enduring reputations of the “classical” writers of the time, Ovid, Horace and the like. It was not uncommon for such recitations to last several hours. But Meniscus, mindful of the fast-moving times, and also of the attention span of his audiences, appears to have honed his pieces down to between ten or fifteen minutes”.
It debuted at Victoria’s Port Fairy Folk Festival in about 1986 in a shambolic busy poetry competition – it came first, I recall, but the event was so poorly organized that I received neither award or recognition.
It began in suitably histrionic Genesis style:
Long time ago In a time before time, When man was an atom in primeval slime, When darkness lay hard on the face of the deep, God called for his angels to sing him to sleep.
I hadn’t finished with Lucifer, however. He reappeared as metaphor in a gloomy commentary of the state of humanity in Devil’s Work, published in full at the end of this article. The narrative actually came to me in a dream – though this was not the nightmarish image of the sleepless Facebook commenter quoted above:
For what you’ve done to you own kind, you’ve done of your own will. If I went away on a holiday, you’d be malignant still. For all you’ve done unto yourselves, you’ve done because you must – A self-destructive legacy to bring yourselves to dust. To render you to dust.
The implication here is that we actually know Lucifer, Satan, the Devil, because, to use a an enduring aphorisms, “we have seen the enemy and he is us!”. Many writers have implied this. In 1942, not long after his return to the Anglican faith in which he’d been raised, my favourite poet WH Auden is said to have asked a Sunday School class: “Do you know what the Devil looks like? The Devil looks like me.” As an informative piece in The Daily Beast observed, “his sensitivity and acuity as a poet made him aware that the pathologies of ideology are first manifest in the pathologies of individuals, including and especially himself, a character he never shied from satirizing or indeed using as a template for the doomed romantic or cruel authoritarian he took as the protagonist of so many of his poems”.
And finally,Lucifer is also name checked in a sprawling ballad about Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab and his obsessive hunt for Moby-Dick, the famous white whale:
Down, down, deep down we dove
In a tangle of rigging and rage –
Down to the deep where the dead sailors sleep
In the darkness of Lucifer’s cage.
From Chapter Forty One – In That Howling Infinite
‘Satanic’ implies the old God-Satan contradiction – and yet it is a paradox. You can’t really have the idea of a universal, omnipotent a God AND a universal, quite potent black hat opposing both Him and Man.
Indeed, we tend to anthropomorphize Old Nick more than we do his rival and nemesis God, although Jesus and Satan often have their own Fight Club going in the New Testament – the ostensibly “evil one” doesn’t get much of a gig in the Old Testament, which is not to say that Jewish folklore didn’t quite ignore him, as I will explain in eccentric detail below. The Essenes of old, who left us a heap of important written material in caves overlooking the Dead Sea, bought into the idea of a conflict between the spirit Princes of Light (God, and in time, Jesus) and of Darkness (Satan – which might’ve come from the ancient Persian Zoroastrian spirit of light and wisdom, Ahura Mazda (remember the light bulbs back in the day?) the Zoroastrian present day heirs are the persecuted Baha’i of Iran (though their HQ is in Haifa, Israel. Ironic, eh?) and the Parsi in India and Pakistan, a name derived from Farsi, now the language Iran and much of Afghanistan.
Then we have the old Parthian prophet Mani who, according to Wikipedia, sought to synthesize the teachings of most of the faiths in vogue from Europe to China and all places betwixt during the third century CE. He gave us Manichaeism, which teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology that describes a struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. It’s not an optimistic one – through an ongoing historical process, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. The Manicheans believed that God was just, and kind, and loving. He was forgiving God who would forgive us our trespasses. It was the Devil, therefore, who had to be propitiated with prayers and amulets and so on – averting “the Evil Eye”. The Manicheans were accordingly persecuted as heretics at best, and as devil-worshipers at worst.
Lucifer, of course, derived from the Latin, meant “light”. He was, of course, an angel. In angelology – yes, there is indeed such a field of study, angels were, or are, because quite a few folk believe that they are real, God’s bodyguards (assuming he was corporeal) and cops before the Jesuits took over. They are categorised by power, authority and also, light. Lucifer was “top gun”, the bee’s knees, dog’s balls, the primus inter pares. Until he got to big for his wings and staged a rebellion.
There is a downside to doing deals with the devil, unless you’re Robert Johnson at the famous Crossroads, or successfully challenging him to a duel like the young fiddler in The Devil Came Down to Georgia or the likely lad in the old English folk song False Knight on the Road. Look what happened to the ambitious Marlowevian sybarite Doctor Faustus.
The unfortunate Yazidi people of Iraqi Kurdistan and northern Syria, ethnically Kurdish, but an ancient religion in an intolerant sea of Islam, were long accused of being “devil worshippers” because they believe that whilst God is benevolent and will not do us intentional harm, the Devil can be quite malevolent and hence needs propitiating. This was how others perceived it back in the dark day, although more enlightened times have emphasized that the Yezidi Peacock Angel is a beautiful and as benign and benevolent a deity as any other in the deities beloved of the world’s believers.
The Peacock Angel, Deviant Art
There was no diabolical god in the Roman and Greek pantheon – or amongst the Norse Gods for that matter. There were gods who did nasty things, but that was because they are annoyed, or angered, or moved to vengeance or malice, or even, envy and lust. These, one placated to restore them to a better humour. Nor is the Satan, the principle of evil personified, actually in the bible. This was a later construct that was read back into it. In the bible according to the poet John in Milton, the devil, whilst not exactly pleasant and delightful, is either on the side of the heavenly authorities at the least, or at the least, not destructively opposed to them. In the words of that great song out of the Brill Building, NYC, “I’m just a boy whose intentions are good. Please don’t let me be misunderstood”.
I dreamt I fought the Devil and I bound him in strong chains To answer for our consciences, to blame for mankind’s stains; For all pain and perversion, crime and atrocity, I brought the criminal to trial in the name of humanity. This bane of humanity.
In judgement of the power man who makes us fight his fights, And the holy men in uniform who trample on our rights; To exact compensation for his prey alive and dead. But when I brought him to the dock, this is what he said… He said: “I had no part on what you say I’ve done to hapless man. He’s master of his destiny – he does the worst he can. I did not set the fires that burn – I only tend the flames. Men forged the swords and lit the brands, wrought carnage my name. They conquered in my name.
“The tyrants and oppressors who jockey for control, Are of mankind’s own substance, the product of his soul. The torturers and murderers – in these, I had no part. They spring from man’s perverse desires and his infernal heart. Damn his eternal heart.
“The tyrant is not guilty and the killer has clean hands. They are but pawns of the soul of man and the fruits of his demands. One half of mankind does not think, the other does not care – And the sheep go to the slaughter when the wolf pack leaves the lair. The wolf has left his lair.
“And I am but an image, a figment of your mind; I am but the whipping boy your hide your sins behind. I was here before you came to Earth, I’ll be here when you’re gone. I don’t ask your forgiveness when you’re deserving none! My undeserving son.
“For what you’ve done to you own kind, you’ve done of your own will. If I went away on a holiday, you’d be malignant still. For all you’ve done unto yourselves, you’ve done because you must – A self-destructive legacy to bring yourselves to dust. To render you to dust.
So when you say I want to rule a realm of ash and bones, Let he who is devoid of sin go cast self-righteous stones. I stand upon the sidelines, contemptuous, aloof. I won’t condemn all that you’ve done. I may condone all that you’ve done. I’m quite content with what you’ve done. But cause it? Give me proof!”
Islam, the faith of some two hundred million souls, has a long and well-documented history of pluralism and tolerance, and indeed, learning. But in recent decades, the faith has been hijacked by the punitive and literalist proclivities of theSalafis, condoned, coopted and championed by the conservative, corrupt, brutal, patriarchal and misogynistic autocracies of Saudi Arab and other Gulf States and ostensibly Islamic states like Iran. If ever there were exemplars for the “religion of peace”, and followers of a “merciful and compassionate” God, these are certainly not. To borrow another faith’s noun, theirs’ is in so many ways a gospel of bondage. [read Alastair Crooke’s excellent article on the history of Wahhabism]
[This, by the way, is a book review and not a theological critique. I neither profess nor profane, although my personal opinions might occasionally intrude. I admit to a sound but not specialist familiarity with and knowledge of Islam and Muslims, and a wide but not expert knowledge of the Middle East]
In The House of Islam – a global history offers the potential for a softer, kinder, spiritual Islam. Author Ed Husain, British-born of Indian heritage, wears his Sufi heart on his sleeve. “Preoccupied with spiritual awareness and depth, Sufi Islam transcends the performative trappings of superficial appearances such as beards and head-coverings, fixation with the simplistic binaries of haram and halal (what is forbidden and not forbidden in Islam) and the state’s imposition of sharia law.”
Little wonder that in many rooms in the House of Islam, Sufis are suspect, sanctioned and silenced – often brutally. As are many “heterogeneous” offshoots of this one true faith, including for many, more than two hundred million Shiah.
It is the authoritarian, mediaeval Salafi-Wahhabi Arabian Peninsula theology and culture that has become commonly adopted as a marker of Muslim authenticity and has assumed the status of the ideal religious identity – notwithstanding the historical preeminence of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad as centres of Muslim learning – and even though Arabs constitute a numerical minority in the Muslim world.
This “Arabization” and indeed, “Saudification” of Islam has colonized, distorted and, indeed, contorted and corrupted the spiritual message of Islam, and with the concurrent attractions and challenges of westernization, has, in Husain’s words, “disoriented the traditional Muslim equilibrium”, and brought forth jihadi abominations like al-Qaeda and Da’ish.
With the spread of ultra-conservative Salafi theology in many parts of the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, Muslims are expected to dress in accordance with “modest” traditional Arabic attire and women are under pressure to wear the headscarf and other more extreme coverings – the latter never sanctioned by either Qur’an or Hadith writ. The writ runs deeper than outward appearance, as exemplified by the subordinate status of women in most Muslim societies. Moreover, Arab and non-Arab Muslims are also expected to abandon their pre-Islamic history and culture – derided as remnants from pre-Islamic ignorance. In its most extreme manifestation, this saw the destruction of humanity’s priceless heritage at Palmyra and Nineveh. Some salafis call for the razing of Egypt’s pyramids.
Muslims in their glory days would refer to what went before as al Jahiliyya, the age of ignorance. But in so many ways, multitudes have returned there, helped in no small part by their more atavistic coreligionists who see salvation, wisdom and benefit to all in reverting to a medieval ethos and lifestyle of some golden age of faith which most scholars maintain never existed.
Islamists are intolerant of anything resembling a free exchange of ideas and information – the very concept of democracy is haram as the Prophet and his successors never thought of it – and possess a cultural antipathy, and iconoclastic rage for all things western, including, in some places, western education (the derivation of the name ’Boko Haram’ for Nigeria’s ISIS franchise). The fundamentalist mindset in all its patriarchal intolerance, prejudice and misogyny is itself often embraced by the ignorant and the uneducated, the downcast and dispossessed, the bitter and the bigoted.
Husain points out that “not every Salafi is a jihadi, but every jihadi is a Salafi. Today’s jihadism, violating all the ethics of Islam, is nothing more than the continuation of the puritanism of the Salafi-Wahhabis“, which originated from the Saudi kingdom – guardian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s most revered cities. There is no space for plurality and doubt in Salafi theology, rooted as it is in the discourse of yaqeen (certainty) and the propagation of an authoritarian one-dimensional piety.
This said, there are many more Muslim-majority states such as Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia and Tunisia – countries that were conceived as secular states, and have largely remained secular or quasi-secular) , and indeed, have and made considerable democratic breakthroughs via the ballot box. Indonesia (the most populous Muslim-majority country) and Malaysia (one of the most industrialised Muslim-majority countries) are not located in the Arab Middle East. And yet, as events in Turkey and Indonesia have shown, the lure of radical Islam and its cultural and moral strictures is an attractive one to would-be authoritarians and to governments fearful of rising populist and nationalist tides.
And herein lies another portend. Just as the Muslim world has its share of religious and political extremists, so do an alarming number of Western democracies that are dominated by populists and ethno-nationalists who often do not hesitate to use religion as a blunt instrument of groupthink. I am thinking here of Russia and its Othodox Church, and of Polish Catholicism, but even ostensibly democratic USA and Israel are subject to the overweening influence of powerful evangelical and Haredim interest groups that endeavour to stamp their moral code on the more temporal majority. As radical British playwright Dennis Potter once remarked, “religion is the wound, not the bandage”.
Academic Lily Rahim notes in he review, published below, that this calls for a systematic analysis of the economic, socio-political, structural and institutional factors that have fueled the ascendancy of all forms of extremism, intolerance and exclusion, often rooted in authoritarian beliefs and systems. And that is a huge, multifaceted project, taking in the economic and social inequality that persists in countries rich and poor, the gap between the few ‘haves’ and the many ‘have-nots’, the power imbalances between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’, the pernicious rise of sectarianism and ethnocentrism, the mirage of ‘manifest destiny’, and the historical habit of the strong to bomb the weak and the poor to blazes.
Civil war and economic desperation have propelled millions of refugees across the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea into Europe, threatening the unity and stability of the European Union. Islamic fundamentalism has filled the vacuum created by crumbling dictatorships and vanishing borders, unleashing atavistic, uncompromising and vicious Jihadis against their own people and co-religionists, and onto the streets of cities as far apart as Paris and Brussels, Istanbul and Baghdad, Jakarta and Mogadishu. In Syria particularly, but also in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan, the longest war in the 21st Century, outsiders have intervened to further complicate the chaos, rendering an early end to what Rudyard Kipling called these “savage wars of peace” a forlorn hope.
“In many respects, the House of Islam is a microcosm of The House of Human History”.
Two other reviews of Ed Husain’s informative and illuminating boo follow.
Boys prepare food for devout Muslims to break their day-long fast on the last Friday of Ramadan in Mumbai, India ( Rajanish Kakade/AP)
Of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims a very large number – perhaps a majority – observed the Ramadan fast last month. This doesn’t simply mean abstaining from food and water during the hours of daylight (as well as sex and cigarettes), but in many cases involves a deliberate reappraisal of one’s relation to God and the world, with more prayers and philanthropy and less shopping.
Of all the obligations that define Islam, Ramadan arouses perhaps the most irritation among some outsiders. A practice that places such a strain on the body is surely an affront to reason. Nor does it seem to make economic sense for workers to be tired and unproductive while declining to perform their allotted roles as consumers with credit ratings. And yet the west has absorbed Ramadan, if uneasily, with supermarket promotions for dates (the Prophet’s favoured breakfast), school assemblies on the subject and “What is Ramadan?” features even in the Sun.
Knowledge about Islam may have improved, but the speed with which relations are changing between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between Muslims, necessitates a constant reassessment of different worldviews and the way they interrelate. Isis’s defeat in Mesopotamiahas not led to any meaningful dialogue between cultures. On the contrary, withGaza aflame, the Iran nuclear accord uprooted and Sunni-Shia tensions at an all-time high, the prospects for detente have rarely been bleaker.
Airstrike on Islamic State militants in Sirte, Libya in 2016 )Manu Brabo/AP)
It’s an illustration of the insincerity of many world leaders that more than 250 French public figures, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy and three former prime ministers, recently demanded that Qur’anic verses endorsing the killing of non-Muslims be “struck down” – just as theSecond Vatican Councilexpurgated elements of Catholic doctrine in the early 1960s. This meretricious proposal affects to assume that Islam is a centralised religion like Catholicism (it isn’t), that the Qur’an can be snipped and remain the Qur’an (it can’t), and that because they recognise the same holy book the Islam of the jihadi is the same as that of the Sufi or the Europeanised Muslim with his Qur’an on the top shelf and his bottle of burgundy on the bottom. When will someone put these contradictions of text, practice and culture into terms accessible to the layperson? Who will speak across the divides?
Enter Ed Husain. A Briton of Indian parentage, a Muslim whose bestselling book, The Islamist described his temporary embrace of the values of global jihad in the 90s, Husain retained his religious faith even after he became a government adviser on deradicalisation. Since then he has lived off the fat of the neoliberal establishment that ran the world before the age of Trump, working for Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation as well as several other well‑heeled thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic. The anti-extremism organisation he co-founded in 2007, Quilliam, is considered by many to be hopelessly compromised by its support for government efforts to squeeze Muslims into the corset of “British” values.
Husain in Brick Lane, London, May 2018 (Andy Hall, The Observer)
Husain’s politics and the company he keeps may be questioned, but they evidently haven’t stopped him from thinking productively about Islam as a force for good in the world. An account of the compassion, reason and wonderment that Islam has exhibited for much of its history, this book is a powerful corrective to the widespread perception, fostered by jihadis and Islamophobes alike, that it’s a belief system for misanthropes.
Husain often cites the Prophet in support of his contention that authentic Islam is a fusion of the good and the workable. Those jihadis who claim Muhammad as their inspiration should reflect that he spent just 10 days out of a 23-year ministry in combat. The Prophet tolerated much worse insults than the caricatures that were used as an excuse for the Charlie Hebdo massacre three years ago. The founder of a religion commonly associated with the forced marriage of young girls accepted a marriage proposal from a woman 15 years older than himself, while his decrees on inheritance, divorce and infanticide vastly improved the lot of Arabian women.
Ever since its inception Islam’s ethos had been contested, but a disastrous turn came with rejection of the printing press and the triumph of scholasticism over independent reasoning, exacerbated by a morale-sapping struggle against European expansionism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Husain rightly says that the root of much Muslim confusion is a sense that a glorious past has soured into defeat and humiliation, but fallen prestige is hardly the monopoly of Muslims. The West has also lost ground, particularly its white males; dealing with changes in status is a part of being human. In general, Husain is too apt to view Muslims and their dignity as qualitatively different from those of other people. His modern politics can also be sketchy. With justification he criticises Saudi Arabia for its promotion of bigotry – less understandable is his soft spot for the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan – less a paragon of generous Islam than thuggish majoritarianism. His insistence that Muslim nations accommodate the tiny Jewish state in their midst is common sense but a suggestion of a Middle Eastern union including Israel reads somewhat grotesquely in the light of the recent carnage in Gaza.
For all that, Husain has written a valuable book, full of suggestions for Islam’s implementation from a position of magnanimity and love. Then the confidence will return.
• The House of Islam: A Global History is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go toguardianbookshop.comor call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Muslim pilgrims pray on the Mountain of Mercy during The Haj. Mount Arafat, marked by a white pillar, is where Prophet Muhammad is believed to have delivered his last sermon to tens of thousands of followers some 1400 years ago, calling on Muslims to unite ( Nariman El-Mofty/AP)
In The House of Islam, Ed Husain affirms the centrality of the pluralist foundations and principles of Islam. Pluralism has also been rooted in Husain’s “lived reality”. His book opens powerfully, with Husain affirming his plural identity: “I am a Westerner and an observant Muslim. Caught between two worlds, I have learnt to dovetail the two facets of my identity. This book is a reflection of that inner bridge between Islam and the West”.
Yet, as the inflections of this superbly written book suggest, Husain’s “inner bridge” extends beyond “Islam and the West” and incorporates “the West” (Britain where he was born and raised), Islam (his faith) and India, his ancestral homeland.
A Turkish Muslim woman prays inside Hiraa cave, where Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation from God to preach Islam, on Noor Mountain, on the outskirts of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.Photo: AP
Husain’s Indian heritage comes across in his whimsical ruminations of Mughal Sufi history, in particular the riveting narrative of Jahanara Begum – the complex and colourful Sufi-inspired daughter of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666), who built the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved wife.
Hussain’s Sufi proclivities are apparent in the chapter “Who is a Sufi”, arguably one of the most engaging chapters. Husain describes the Sufi as one who “seeks only to please God, and does so in secret as often as possible”, grapples with “the heart and soul of Islam” and strives towards “maintaining equilibrium while swimming in deep oceans of spiritual awareness, and the ways in which the human ego could be crushed”.
Preoccupied with spiritual awareness and depth, Sufi Islam transcends the performative trappings of superficial appearances such as beards and head-coverings, fixation with the simplistic binaries of haram and halal (what is forbidden and not forbidden in Islam) and the state’s imposition of sharia law.
In contrast to the rigid, punitive and literalist tendencies of Salafi Islam, as promoted by the conservative monarchies in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and supposed Islamic states such as Iran, Sufi Islam’s leanings are inclusive, compassionate and speak to the complex yearnings of the human soul.
These leanings are evident in Rumi’s message of learning, hope and redemption, as the renowned Sufi poet ruminated: “Come. Come, whoever you are./ Wanderer, worshipper, lover of learning./ It doesn’t matter./ Ours is not a caravan of despair./ Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times./ Come, yet again, come, come.”
Husain’s considerable insights on the house of Islam, made up of more than 1.5 billion Muslims, have been shaped by his lived incarnations as an Islamist, Salafist and current abode in mystical Sufi Islam. His destiny within Sufi Islam culminated after many years of study under the guidance of Islamic scholars and living in the Middle East.
Enriched by these experiences, Husain notes that he has the “rare privilege of being an insider both in the West and in the Muslim World”. Yet, it could also be deduced that his acute insights have been cultivated by his status as an “outsider” in both the West and the Arab Middle East – stemming from his minority Indian ethnicity in both domains.
The House of Islam is understandably concerned with authoritarian and Salafi-Wahhabi Gulf Arab theology and culture that has become commonly adopted as a marker of Muslim authenticity. This peculiarity has assumed the status of the ideal religious identity – even though Arabs constitute a numerical minority in the Muslim world.
Husain insightfully asserts that Arabisation as well as Westernisation has “disoriented the traditional Muslim equilibrium”, as manifested by the rise of Salafi jihadi groups such as Isis and al-Qaeda.
With the spread of ultra-conservative Salafi theology in many parts of the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, Muslims are expected to dress in accordance with “modest” traditional Arabic attire and women are under pressure to wear the headscarf and other coverings. Arab and non-Arab Muslims are also expected to jettison their pre-Islamic history and culture – derided as remnants from pre-Islamic ignorance or jahiliyya.
Husain reminds us of the paradox of the current Salafi dominance by noting that in the 1790s, Salafis were not even considered Muslims by the chief qadi (cleric) of Mecca; indeed, for several years Salafis were kept away from the holy cities and The Haj.
He highlights the theological ties between Salafi Islam and jihadi Islamists, such as Isis and al-Qaeda, by pointing out that “not every Salafi is a jihadi, but every jihadi is a Salafi…. Today’s jihadism, violating all the ethics of Islam, is nothing more than the continuation of the puritanism of the Salafi-Wahhabis”, which originated from the Saudi kingdom – guardian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s most revered cities.
There is no space for plurality and doubt in Salafi theology, rooted as it is in the discourse of yaqeen (certainty) and the propagation of an authoritarian one-dimensional piety.
The House of Islam is a valuable read, particularly for those with some understanding of Islam and the Muslim world. Husain is a gifted writer and perceptive observer particularly of the Arab Middle East.
That said, the book makes minimal references to the more dynamic and democratising Muslim-majority states such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Tunisia – countries that were conceived as secular states (have largely remained secular or quasi-secular) and made considerable democratic breakthroughs via the ballot box. Instructively, Indonesia (the most populous Muslim-majority country) and Malaysia (one of the most industrialised Muslim-majority countries) are not located in the Arab Middle East.
Instead of pointing to Israel as a source of emulation for the Muslim world, Husain could well have highlighted these consolidating democracies. All three countries boast a vibrant civil society, coalition governments based on power-sharing and political systems based on secular constitutionalism.
Despite the penetrating insights in The House of Islam, Husain’s narrative of the myriad hurdles confronting the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, and Israel’s role in this struggle, is somewhat disappointing.
Just as the Muslim world has its share of religious and political extremists, so does Israel and an alarming number of Western democracies that are dominated by populists and ethno-nationalists. This calls for a systematic analysis of the economic, socio-political, structural and institutional factors that have fuelled the ascendency of all forms of extremism, intolerance and exclusion, often rooted in authoritarian beliefs and systems. In many respects, the House of Islam is a microcosm of The House of Human History.
Lily Rahim is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, where she teaches Political Islam and Southeast Asian Politics. Her more recent books include Muslim Secular Democracy and The Politics of Islamism. Ed Husain is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au).
One might be surprised to hear this, but Yiddish lives in Israel- and not just among Hasidim. Yiddish is the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews like me. Before someone says something stupid, let me clarify something- Yiddish is NOT a “mixture of German and Hebrew”. It is also not only a Hasidic language- it has existed for at least a thousand years as a distinct language, whereas Hasidism has been around for about 400. On the eve of the Holocaust, 13 million Jews- socialists, communists, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Hasidim, secularists- spoke the language.
Yiddish is an archaeology of the Jewish people and linguistic proof of our ties to the Land of Israel. About 2000 years ago, Romans expelled Jews from Israel and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews who weren’t executed were expelled or enslaved. Many eventually made their way to other parts of the Roman Empire, where their Aramaic…
In That Howling Infinite 